“No, it was more like—­we must have put one on each other.  It—­it was fierce!”

“Happy days!” cheered the private.  She lighted him with the effulgence of a knowing smile.

“Thanks a lot,” she said.

The war went on.

* * * * *

In her next letter Winona Penniman wrote:  “We moved up to a station nearer the front last Tuesday.  I spent a night with Patricia Whipple.  The child has come through it all wonderfully so far.  A month ago she was down and out; now she can’t get enough work to do.  Says the war bores her stiff.  She means to stick it through, but all her talk is of going home.  By the way, she told me she had a little visit with Wilbur Cowan the other day.  She says she never saw him looking better.”

CHAPTER XIX

Two lines of helmeted men went over the crest of the hill.  Private Cowan was no longer conscious of aching feet and leaden legs or of the burden that bowed his shoulders.  There was a pounding in his ears, and in his mind a verse of Scripture that had lingered inexplicably there since their last billet at Comprey.  His corporal, late a theological student, had read and expounded bits of the Bible to such as would listen.  Forsaking beaten paths, he had one day explored Revelations.  He had explained the giving unto seven angels of seven golden vials of the wrath of God, but later came upon a verse that gave him pause: 

“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”

It seemed that everything in Revelations had a hidden meaning, and the expert found this obscure.  There had been artless speculation among the listeners.  A private with dice had professed to solve the riddle of the Number Seven, and had even alleged that twelve might be easier to throw if one kept repeating the verse, but this by his fellows was held to be rank superstition.  No really acceptable exposition had been offered of the woman clothed with the sun, and under her feet the moon, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.

Wilbur Cowan, marching up the hill, now sounded the words to himself; they went with that pounding in his ears.  At last he knew what they meant—­a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and under her feet the moon.  Over and over he chanted the words.

So much was plain to him.  But how had it come about?  They had looked, then enveloped each other, not thinking, blindly groping.  They had been out of themselves, not on guard, not held by a thousand bands of old habit that back in Newbern would have restrained them.  Lacking these, they had rushed to that wild contact like two charged clouds, and everything was changed by that moment’s surrender to some force beyond their relaxed wills.  Something between them had not been, now it was; something compelling; something that had, for its victory, needed only that they confront each other, not considering, not resisting, biddable.