“Well, this is how I see it.  Neither side has a broad-minded General in command of the whole field of war.  Every day sees bits of fights, skirmishes, useless loss of life.  There is on neither side any connected scheme of war.  God knows how it will end.  I do not yet see the man.  If Robert Lee were in absolute command of all the effective force of the South, we would have trouble.”

“But if he is so good a soldier, why did he make what you call a frontal attack on entrenched troops at Malvern?”

“My dear, when two men spar and neither can quite end the fight, one gets angry or over-confident and loses his head, then he does something wild—­and pays for it.”

“I see.  You leave on Monday?”

“Yes—­early.”

“Mr. Rivers means to talk after service to the men who are enlisting.”

“So he told me.  I begged him to be moderate.”

“He asked me for a text, uncle.”

“Well!”

“I gave him the one about Caesar and God.”

“What put that into your head—­it does not seem suitable?”

“Oh, do you think so?  Some one once mentioned it to me.  I could preach on it myself, but texts grow wonderfully in his hands.  They glow—­oh, they get halos about them.  He ought to be in a great city.”

“Oh, my dear, Mark Rivers has his limitations like all of us.  He would die.  Even here he has to be watched.  McGregor told him last year that he was suffering from the contagion of other people’s wickedness with occasional acute fits of over-conscientiousness.  Rivers said it was incomprehensible nonsense; he was almost angry.”

“And yet it is true, Uncle Jim.”

“I’m glad I haven’t the disease.  I told McGregor as much.  By George! he said my variety of the disorder was about other folk’s stupidity.  Then, when I said that I didn’t understand him, he laughed.  He makes me furious when he only laughs and won’t answer—­and won’t explain.”

“Why, uncle!  I love to see him laugh.  He laughs all over—­he shakes.  I told him it was a mirthquake.  That set him off again.  Was Tom McGregor badly hurt?”

“No, not badly.”

“Will aunt go to church to-morrow?”

“No.”

“I thought she would not.  I should love to see you in uniform.”

“Not here, my dear, but I will send you a daguerreotype.”

* * * * *

When on this Sunday long remembered in Westways, the tall figure of Mark Rivers rose to open the service, he saw the little church crowded, the aisles filled, and in the front pews Penhallow, his niece, and behind them the young men who were to join his regiment.  Grace had asked his own people to be present, and here and there were the mothers and sisters of the recruits, and a few men on crutches or wasted by the fevers of the Virginia marshes.  Mark Rivers read the morning service as few men know how to read it.  He rarely needed the prayer-book—­he knew