So she read to him in a low, soothing voice, glancing from time to time at the bandaged face.  And, when she saw he was asleep, she sat silent, hands nervously clasped above the Bible on her knee.  Then her lids closed for an instant as she recited a prayer for the man she loved, wherever he might be that moon-lit night.

A zouave, terribly wounded on Roanoke Island, began to fret; she rose and walked swiftly to him, and the big sunken eyes opened and he said, humbly: 

“I am sorry to inconvenience you, Mrs. Paige.  I’ll try to keep quiet.”

“You foolish fellow, you don’t inconvenience me.  What can I do for you?”

His gaze was wistful, but he said nothing, and she bent down tenderly, repeating her question.

A slight flush gathered under his gaunt cheek bones.  “I guess I’m just contrary,” he muttered.  “Don’t bother about me, ma’am.”

“You are thinking of your wife; talk to me about her, Neil.”

It was what he wanted; he could endure the bandages.  So, her cool smooth hand resting lightly over his, where it lay on the sheets, she listened to the home-sick man until it was time to give another sufferer his swallow of lemonade.

Later she put on a gingham overgown, sprinkled it and her hands with camphor, and went into the outer wards where the isolated patients lay—­where hospital gangrene and erysipelas were the horrors.  And, farther on, she entered the outlying wing devoted to typhus.  In spite of the open windows the atmosphere was heavy; everywhere the air seemed weighted with the odour of decay.

As always, in spite of herself, she hesitated at the door.  But the steward on duty rose; and she took his candle and entered the place of death.

Toward morning a Rhode Island artilleryman, dying in great pain, relapsed into coma.  Waiting beside him, she wrote to his parents, enclosing the little keepsakes he had designated when conscious, while his life flickered with the flickering candle.  Her letter and his life ended together; dawn made the candle-light ghastly; a few moments later the rumble of the dead waggon sounded in the court below.  The driver came early because there was a good deal of freight for his waggon that day.  A few moments afterward the detail arrived with the stretchers, and Ailsa stood up, drew aside the screen, and went down into the gray obscurity of the court-yard.

Grave-diggers were at work on a near hillside; she could hear the clink clink of spade and pick; reveille was sounding from hill to hill; the muffled stirring became a dull, sustained clatter, never ceasing around her for one instant.

A laundress was boiling clothing over a fire near by; Ailsa slipped off her gingham overdress, unbound the white turban, and tossed them on the grass near the fire.  Then, rolling back her sleeves, she plunged her arms into a basin of hot water in which a little powdered camphor was floating.