r, he
grasped her, lifted, enfolded her for a moment, then as fiercely put
her from him and went out, leaving Harriet sick, shaken, at this sight
of human passion seen for the first time.

The following day Harriet's father returned and she went home.

When she next saw her brother it was in Louisville, where he was
driven back to his own people by reason of his Northern creed and
sympathies. His father-in-law had been among the first to fall in
defence of the Confederacy, and with Alexander, now, was his
mother-in-law, widowed and dependent, and a wife in this sense changed
from child to woman--that she was a fiercely avowed Southerner to the
fibre of her.

With his little family he remained in Louisville a year. If his own
people wondered at the extravagance of his wife and mother-in-law at a
time when incomes were so seriously shrunken, Alexander was too much a
Blair for even a Blair to approach the subject.

The child was sent daily to his mother's--he saw to that--a pretty
baby, the little Mary Alexina, and robed like a young princess; but
beyond this he seemed to discourage intimacy between the households.
Certainly there was no common ground, the business judgment, large
experience, and the integrity of the Blairs being in the constant
service of the government, while rumor had it that the home of young
Mrs. Alexander Blair was the social rallying place for Southern
sympathizers generally.

Suddenly, in the midst of big affairs, Alexander arranged otherwise
for the maintenance of his wife's mother, whom it was his to support
for the few remaining years of her life, and went to Europe with Molly
and the child. Long after it came to Harriet's hearing that the
frequent presence of a young Confederate officer at his house had led
to the step.

It was four years from this time, in 1867, that Alexander Blair, the
senior, died, to be shortly followed by his wife.

Though the son Alexander returned to Louisville of necessity,
following these events, he left Molly and the child in Washington with
some of her people there. And though his interests became centred in
Louisville again, he never brought his family back, but went and came
between the two places. In domestic infelicity it is our own people we
would hide it from longest. It was two years after, in '69, that
Alexander met his end with the shocking suddenness of accidental death
as he was returning East to Molly and the child.

CHAPTER TWO

The