"Whole theatre of action."

The figure had sounded apt to Anna on that Sunday evening when the Doctor employed it; apt enough--until the outburst of that great and dreadful news whose inseparable implications and forebodings robbed her of all sleep that night and made her the first one astir at daybreak. But thenceforward, and now for half a week or more, the aptness seemed quite to have passed. Strange was the theatre whose play was all and only a frightful¹ reality; whose swarming², thundering, smoking stage had its audience, its New Orleans audience, wholly behind it, and whose curtain of distance, however thin, mocked every bodily sense and compelled all to be seen and heard by the soul's eye and ear, with all the joy and woe⁴ of its actuality and all its suspense⁵, terror, triumph, heartbreak, and despair.

Yet here was that theatre, and the Doctor's metaphor⁶ was still good enough for the unexacting taste of the two Valcour ladies, to whom Anna had quoted it. And here, sprinkled through the vast audience of that theatre, with as keen a greed for its play as any, were all the various non-combatants with whom we are here concerned, though not easily to be singled out, such mere⁷ units were they of the impassioned multitude every mere unit of which, to loved and loving ones, counted for more than we can tell.

However, our favourites might be glimpsed now and then. On a certain midday of that awful half-week the Callenders, driving, took up Victorine at her gate and Flora⁸ at her door and sped up-town to the newspaper offices in Camp street to rein⁹ in against a countless¹⁰ surge of old men in fine dress, their precious dignity thrown to the dogs, each now but one of the common

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