and then all was still again. At such awful intervals the sun shone out
brightly, touched the green of the still sleeping woods and the red and
white of a flower in the garden, and something in a gray uniform writhed
out of the dust of the road, staggered to the wall, and died.

A mile down this road, growing more and more obscure with those rising
and falling apparitions or the shapeless and rugged heaps terrible in
their helpless inertia by hedge and fence, arose the cemetery hill.
Taken and retaken thrice that afternoon, the dead above it far
outnumbered the dead below; and when at last the tide of battle swept
around its base into the dull, reverberating woods, and it emerged from
the smoke, silenced and abandoned, only a few stragglers remained. One
of them, leaning on his musket, was still gloomily facing the woods.

"Joseph Corbin," said a low, hurried voice.

He started and glanced quickly at the tombs around him. Perhaps it was
because he had been thinking of the dead,--but the voice sounded like
HIS. Yet it was only the SISTER, who had glided, pale and haggard, from
the thicket.

"They are coming through the woods," she said quickly. "Run, or you'll
be taken. Why do you linger?"

"You know why," he said gloomily.

"Yes, but you have done yo' duty. You have done his work. The task is
finished now, and yo' free."

He did not reply, but remained gazing at the woods.