ir--whipped 'em clean off the field!"

He paused, clapped his knee, and roared.

"That's your North Carolinian," he said. "He's a God Almighty fighter,
but you've got to make him mad first."

Miss Chris brought her knitting to the lamp, and Eugenia, sitting with
her hands in her lap, followed the conversation with abstracted
interest.

It was not until Dudley rose to go that he came over to her and took her
hand.

"Good-night," he said, his ardent eyes upon her. "I'm to have that ride
to-morrow? You know I came for it."

The unreasoning blood beat in her face as she turned away, and she was
conscious that he had seen and misconstrued the senseless blush. It was
her misfortune to go red or pale without cause and to show an impassive
face above deep emotion.

The next morning she rode with Dudley, and the day after he came out
before returning to Richmond. She experienced a certain pleasure in the
contact with his bouyant optimism, but it was not without a sensation of
relief that she watched him depart after his last visit. It seemed to
leave her more to herself--and to Nicholas.

That afternoon she walked with him far across the fields, and they laid
together phantasmal foundations of their future lives. Perhaps the chief
thing to be said of their intercourse was that it was to each a mental
stimulant as well as an emotional delight. Eugenia's quick, untutored
mind, which had run to seed like an uncultivated garden, blossomed from
contact with his practical, unpolished intellect. He taught her logic
and a little law; she taught him poetry and passion. He argued his cases
to her and swept her back into the days of his old political
dreams--dreams from which he had awakened, but which still hovered as
memories in his waking hours. Sometimes he brought his books to Battle
Hall, and they read together beneath the general's unseeing eyes; but
more often they sat side by side in the pasture or the wood, the volume
lying open between them. He was the first man who had ever spurred her
into thought; she was the first woman he had ever loved.

As they walked across the fields this afternoon they drifted back to the
question of themselves and their own happiness. It was only a matter of
waiting, she said, of the patient passage of time; and they were so
sure of each other that all else was unimportant--to be disregarded.

"But am I sure of you?" he demanded.

It was not a personal distrust of Eugenia that he voiced;