“She is _not_ dead, I tell you. And there can be no divorce. Insanity bars all claim to a divorce. She is in an asylum. She had to leave him, and then she went mad.”
“Oh, no, Carrol, it is all a mistake; it is not so. Carrol,” she murmured in a voice so faint that he could not help glancing at her, half in fury and half in pity. She was slowly falling from her horse. He sprang from his saddle, caught her in his arms, and laid her on the turf, wishing the while that it covered her grave. Just then one of Waldron’s orderlies rode up and exclaimed: “What is the matter with the--the boy? Hullo, Charlie.”
Fitz Hugh stared at the man in silence, tempted to tear him from his horse. “The boy is ill,” he answered when he recovered his self-command. “Take charge of him yourself.” He remounted, rode onward out of sight beyond a thicket, and there waited for the brigade commander, now and then fingering his revolver. As Charlie was being placed in an ambulance by the orderly and a sergeant’s wife, Waldron came up, reined in his horse violently, and asked in a furious voice, “Is that boy hurt?
“Ah--fainted,” he added immediately. “Thank you, Mrs. Gunner. Take good care of him--the best of care, my dear woman, and don’t let him leave you all day.”
Further on, when Fitz Hugh silently fell into his escort, he merely glanced at him in a furtive way, and then cantered on rapidly to the head of the cavalry. There he beckoned to the tall, grave, iron-gray Chaplain of the Tenth, and rode with him for nearly an hour, apart, engaged in low and seemingly impassioned discourse. From this interview Mr. Colquhoun returned to the escort with a strangely solemnized, tender countenance, while the commandant, with a more cheerful air than he had yet worn that day, gave himself to his martial duties, inspecting the landscape incessantly with his glass, and sending frequently for news to the advance scouts. It may properly be stated here that the Chaplain never divulged to any one the nature of the conversation which he had held with his Colonel.
Nothing further of note occurred until the little army, after two hours of plodding march, wound through a sinuous, wooded ravine, entered a broad, bare, slightly undulating valley, and for the second time halted. Waldron galloped to the summit of a knoll, pointed to a long eminence which faced him some two miles distant, and said tranquilly, “There is our battle-ground.”