She was a gentle little thing, with ideas of her own concerning the disaster to the army which was abandoning thousands of its wounded to the charity and the prisons of an enemy already too poor to feed and clothe its own.

“Some of our Sisters stayed behind, and many of the medical staff and even the contract surgeons remained.  I hope the rebels will be gentle with them.  I expected to stay, but Sister Aurelienne and I were ordered to Azalea last night.  I almost cried my eyes out when I left our wounded.  The shells were coming into the hospital yesterday, and one of them killed two of our wounded in the straw.  Oh, it was sad and terrible.  I am sure the rebels didn’t fire on us on purpose.  Do you think so?”

“No, I don’t.  Were you frightened, Sister.”

“Oh, yes,” she said naively, “and I wished I could run into the woods and hide.”

“But you didn’t?”

“Why, no, I couldn’t,” she said, surprised.

The fever in his wound was making him light-headed.  At intervals he imagined that it was Ailsa seated behind him, her arms around his waist, her breath cool and fragrant on his neck; and still he knew she was a phantom born of fever, and dared not speak—­became sly, pretending he did not know her lest the spell break and she vanish into thin air again.

What the little sister said was becoming to him only a pretty confusion of soft sounds; at moments he was too deaf to hear her voice at all; then he heard it and still believed it to be Ailsa who was speaking; then, for a, few seconds, reality cleared his clouded senses; he heard the steady thunder of the cannonade, the steady clattering splash of his squadron; felt the hot, dry wind scorching his stiffened cheek and scalp where the wound burned and throbbed under a clotted bandage.

When the regiment halted to fill canteens the little sister washed and re-bandaged his face and head.

It was a ragged slash running from the left ear across the cheek-bone and eyebrow into the hair above the temple—­a deep, swollen, angry wound.

“What were you doing when you got this?” she asked in soft consternation, making him as comfortable as possible with the scanty resources of her medical satchel.  Later, when the bugles sounded, she came back from somewhere down the line, suffered him to lift her up behind him, settled herself, slipped both arms confidently around his waist, and said: 

“So you are the soldier who took the Confederate battle flag?  Why didn’t you tell me?  Ah—­I know.  The bravest never tell.”

“There is nothing to tell,” he replied.  “They captured a guidon from us.  It evens the affair.”

She said, after a moment’s thought; “It speaks well for a man to have his comrades praise him as yours praise you.”

“You mean the trooper Burgess,” he said wearily.  “He’s always chattering.”

“All who spoke to me praised you,” she observed.  “Your colonel said:  ’He does not understand what fear is.  He is absolutely fearless.’”