“Yes. I’ll take you on now. Tell your captain.”
Outside he heard the news of the battle of Chancellorsville.
“It was a victory!” said the men, sore from Port Gibson. “A big victory! We’re having them straight along in Virginia.”
“It ain’t a victory to have Stonewall Jackson wounded.”
“Telegram said he’d get well. Old Jack isn’t going to leave us. God! We’d miss him awful!”
Edward and Désirée had one hour together. They spent it in the garden, sitting beneath a flowering tree.
“How soon are you coming back? Oh, how soon are you coming back?”
“As soon as we may. It must be soon, for the fighting will begin now. Port Gibson was but the opening gun.”
“We have been making the cave for this house larger. A siege....”
“I do not believe that we should pen ourselves up here. Grant can bring, if needed, a hundred thousand men. He is a dogged, earnest man. I think that we should concentrate as rapidly as possible and move from behind these walls. The odds are not much greater than they were in the Valley, or during the Seven Days.”