But how was she to know that here, only a few
rods before her, lay scores and hundreds of George Osbornes, or
his betters, and in their graves the love and hope of many Emmys,
not creatures of the imagination, but flesh and blood, like herself?
To her, there was no more in those associations which made
Carrington groan in the silence of his thoughts, than if he had been
old Kaspar, and she the little Wilhelmine. What was a skull more
or less to her? What concern had she in the famous victory?
Yet even Sybil was startled as she rode through the gate and found
herself suddenly met by the long white ranks of head-stones,
stretching up and down the hill-sides by thousands, in order of
baffle; as though Cadmus had reversed his myth, and had sown
living men, to come up dragons' teeth. She drew in her horse with
a shiver and a sudden impulse to cry. Here was something new to
her. This was war--wounds, disease, death. She dropped her voice
and with a look almost as serious as Carrington's, asked what all
these graves meant. When Carrington told her, she began for the
first time to catch some dim notion why his face was not quite as
gay as her own. Even now this idea was not very precise, for he
said little about himself, but at least she grappled with the fact that
he had actually, year after year, carried arms against these men
who lay at her feet and who had given their lives for her cause. It
suddenly occurred to her as a new thought that perhaps he himself
might have killed one of them with his own hand.
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