Each for the other's sake the lads rejected the hospital, with its risk of capture. The younger had the stricken one hurried off toward the railway and a refugee mother in the hills, Constance tenderly protesting until the surgeon murmured the truth:
"It'll be all one to him by to-morrow."
As the rearmost ship was passing the house Anna, her comeliness restored, half rose from her bed, where Miranda stood trying to keep her. From all the far side of the house remotely sounded the smart tramp and shuffle of servants clearing away wreckage, and the din of their makeshift repairs. She was "all right again," she said as she sat, but the abstraction of her eyes and the harkening droop of her head showed that inwardly she still saw and heard the death-struck boy.
Suddenly she stood. "Dear, brave Connie!" she exclaimed, "we must go help her, 'Randa." And as they went she added, pausing at the head of a stair, "Ah, dear! if we, poor sinners all, could in our dull minds only multiply the awful numbers of war's victims by the woes that gather round any one of them, don't you think, 'Randa--?"
Yes, Miranda agreed, certainly if man--yes, and woman--had that gift wars would soon be no more.
On a high roof above their apartment stood our Valcour ladies. About them babbling feminine groups looked down upon the harbor landings black with male vagabonds and witlings smashing the precious food freight (so sacred yesterday), while women and girls scooped the spoils from mire and gutter into buckets, aprons or baskets, and ran home with it through Jackson Square and scurried back again with grain-sacks and pillow-slips, and while the cotton burned on and the ships, so broadly dark aloft, so pale in their war paint below and so alive with silent, motionless men, came through the smoking havoc.
"No uze to hope," cooed the grandmother to Flora, whose gaze clung to the tree-veiled top of Callender House. "It riffuse' to burn. 'Tis not a so inflammab' like that rope and tar." The rope and tar meant their own burnt ship.
"Ah, well," was the light reply, "all shall be for the bes'! Those who watch the game close and play it with courage--"
"And cheat with prudenze--?"
"Yes! to them God is good. How well you know that! And Anna, too, she's learning it--or she shall--dear Anna! Same time me, I am well content."