"Have I dreamed that we met before?" he asked slowly. "Piquette?"

"You know!" she exclaimed, her face lighting gloriously. "I didn't dream alone!"

"No," he said. "No. You didn't dream alone. Your name is Piquette, isn't it? I don't know why I said that. It seemed right."

"It is right."

"And you live here?"

"Up there," she said, and pointed to one of the doors that looked out on the balcony.

Beauregard looked up at the balcony and the door, and he knew, as though he had prevision, that before he left the courtyard he would go through that door with Piquette.

He took her hands in his.

"I'll never let you leave me," he murmured.

General Beauregard Courtney sat under the open-sided tent that was his field headquarters and stretched long legs under the flimsy table. He gazed morosely out toward Tullahoma in the north, where the trenches stretched endlessly from east to west and only an occasional artillery shell broke the quiet of the battlefield.

Stalemate.

"I thought trench warfare went out with World War I," he growled to his executive officer.

"No, sir. Apparently not, sir," replied Colonel Smithson correctly, not interrupting his preparation of tomorrow's orders.

Stalemate. The Northern armies and the Southern armies had collided with great carnage on that battlefield. Fighting had swayed back and forth for weeks, and at last had settled down to a stubborn holding action by both sides.

That had been months ago. Now trenches and fortifications and tank traps extended across southern Tennessee from the Cumberlands to the Mississippi. Occasional offensives came to naught. Only the planes of both sides swept daily over the lines, bombarding the rear areas, reducing the cities of Tennessee to rubble.

Beauregard toyed with a pencil and listened idly to the news over the little radio at his elbow. It was a Nashville station, and Nashville was held by the North, but he had learned how to discount 

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