While the vehicle, with its melancholy freight, was being slowly trailed over the scene of the late battle, Harold partially recovered his benumbed senses.  He lay there as in a dream, striving to recall himself to consciousness of his position.  He felt the dull throbbing pain upon his brow and the stinging sensation in his shoulder, and knew that he was wounded, but whether dangerously or not he could not judge.  He could feel the trickling of blood from the bosom of a wounded comrade at his side, and could hear the groans of another whose thigh was shattered by the fragment of a shell; but the situation brought no feeling of repugnance, for he was yet half stunned and lay as in a lethargy, wishing only to drain one draught of water and then to sleep.  The monotonous rumbling of the ambulance wheels sounded distinctly upon his ear, and he could listen, with a kind of objectless curiosity, to the casual conversation of the driver, as he exchanged words here and there with others, who were returning upon the same dismal errand from the scene of carnage.  The shadows of night spread around him, covering the field of battle like a pall flung in charity by nature over the corpses of the slain.  Then his bewildered fancies darkened with the surrounding gloom, and he thought that he was coffined and in a hearse, being dragged to the graveyard to be buried.  He put forth his hand to push the coffin lid, but it fell again with weakness, and when his fingers came in contact with the splintered bone that protruded from his neighbor’s thigh, and he felt the warm gushing of the blood that welled with each throb of the hastily bound artery, he puzzled his dreamy thoughts to know what it might mean.  At last all became a blank upon his brain, and he relapsed once more into unconsciousness.

And so, from dreamy wakefulness to total oblivion he passed to and fro, without an interval to part the real from the unreal.  He was conscious of being lifted into the arms of men, and being borne along carefully by strong arms.  Whither?  It seemed to his dull senses that they were bearing him into a sepulchre, but he was not terrified, but careless and resigned; or if he thought of it at all, it was to rejoice that when laid there, he should be undisturbed.  Presently a vague fancy passed athwart his mind, that perhaps the crawling worms would annoy him, and he felt uneasy, but yet not afraid.  Afterward, there was a sensation of quiet and relief, and his brain, for a space, was in repose.  Then a bright form bent over him, and he thought it was an angel.  He could feel a soft hand brushing the dampness from his brow, and fingers, whose light touch soothed him, parting his clotted hair.  The features grew more distinct, and it pleased him to look upon them, although he strove in vain to fix them in his memory, until a tear-drop fell upon his cheek, and recalled his wandering senses; then he knew that Oriana was bending over him and weeping.

He was in the cottage where Beverly had last parted from his sister; not in the same room, for they feared to place him there, where Miranda was lying in a shroud, with a coffin by her bed-side, lest the sad spectacle should disturb him when he woke.  But he lay upon a comfortable bed in another room, and Beverly and Oriana stood beside, while the surgeon dressed his wounds.