Every few days arose rumours of a great battle fought on Virginia soil, corroborated by extras, denied next morning.

During the last half of July such reports had been current daily, tightening the tension, frightening parents, wives, and sweethearts.

Recent armed affrays had been called battles; the dead zouaves at Big Bethel, a dead trooper at Alexandria sobered and silenced the street cheering.

Yet, what a real battle might be, nobody really comprehended or even surmised.
To Ailsa Paige June and July passed like fevered dreams; the brief sweet spring had suddenly turned into summer in a single day--a strange, stifling, menacing summer full of heavy little thunder-storms which rolled crackling and banging up the Hudson amid vivid electric displays, leaving no coolness behind their trailing wake of rain.
Society was lingering late in town--if the few nebulous, unorganised, and scattered social groups could be called society--small coteries drawn temporarily together through accident of environment, inherited family acquaintance, traditional, material, or religious interest, and sometimes by haphazard intellectual compatibility.
In the city, and in Ailsa's little world, the simple social routine centring in Sainte Ursula's and the Assembly in winter, and in Long Branch and Saratoga in summer, had been utterly disorganised.

Very few of her friends had yet left for the country; nor had she made any arrangements for this strange, unreal summer, partly because, driven to find relief from memory in occupation, she was devoting herself very seriously to the medical instruction under Dr.Benton; partly because she did not consider it a fitting time to seek the coolness and luxury of inland spa or seaside pier.
Colonel Arran had brought back with him from Washington a Captain Hallam, a handsome youngster who wore his cavalry uniform to perfection and who had become instantly attentive to Ailsa,--so attentive that before she realised it he was a regular visitor at her house, appropriating the same chair that Berkley always had--Berkley!---- At the memory she closed her eyes instinctively.