"Urrgh! Uhh! Huh! Huh!" yelled the captains.
Each company tossed its rifles into place, dressed down the line, marked step for a moment, and then flashed its hundred legs in unison to the band. The yellow field of corn once more wavered in the wind and blew slowly forward.
Ellen and Ralston sat motionless in the hansom as the battalions tramped by. At the head of his company marching with drawn sword, his head slightly bent and his gaze straight before him, came Steadman, but his eyes sought them not. The hospital corps with their stretchers brought up the rear and disappeared through the gates. The commissariat wagons followed stragglingly. The band could be heard dimly in the distance.
Then the whistle blew again and the man who had opened the gates ran out and closed them. The Twelfth had gone--with a full quota of officers.
"The Chilsworth," said Ralston, through the manhole.
The driver once more hitched the reins over the back of his moribund beast, and they started uptown.
"Dick," said Ellen suddenly, in a whisper, "Dick!"
"I--I was mistaken last night," she said, coloring and looking away from him.
"What do you mean?" cried Ralston, his heart leaping.
"That--there was only one," she answered softly, smiling through her tears, "and--and--_it wasn't_ John!"
The cabby grinned sleepily and silently closed the manhole, with a fatherly expression illuminating his corrugated countenance.
"Hully gee!" he muttered meditatively. "I mighta known there was a woman mixed up in it, somehow! Glad he got her!--Git on thar, you!"
Between the ferry houses the boat was swinging out into midstream, her decks crowded with yellow figures, and across the dancing waves the wind bore the faint strains of "Good-by, Little Girl, Good-by."
"For I say this is death and the sole death,-- When a man's loss comes to him from his gain, Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance, And lack of love from love made manifest." --_A Death in the Desert._
"Harry might have stopped!" thought Brown, as a stalwart young man strode briskly past with a short "Good evening." "I've not had a chance to speak to him for a month." He hesitated as if doubtful whether or not to follow and overtake the other, then turned in his original direction. His delight in the scene about him was too exquisite to be interrupted even for a talk with his friend. Dusk was just falling. For an instant a purple glow lingered upon the spires of the beautiful gray cathedral whose chimes were softly echoing above the murmur of the city; then the light slipped upward and upward, until, touching the topmost point, it vanished into the shadows.