as for the Crosby of those days a mansion of
the first class. The captain, the tradition is, was a wild, obstinate
fellow with black hair and brilliant eyes (I fancy Emily has much of her
father in her), and nobody was greatly surprised, when the war broke
out, to have him at first lukewarm, and then avowedly a Confederate. Of
course he might as well have professed atheism or free love in this
locality--he might better have blown his brains out--which he
practically did, anyway. Public sentiment forced him out of the state
and over Mason and Dixon's line, and he entered the rebel army as a
cavalry captain, and deliberately (we heard) got himself killed. Of
course the Drainger fortune, fair enough for those days, went to pieces
at once.

"Mrs. Drainger immediately adopted the policy of complete seclusion she
was to follow ever after. When the captain left, it was said they would
not speak; at any rate, she broke off her friendships, refused herself
to callers, and saw nobody. Her condition served her as an excuse, but
everybody knew, I guess, the real reason why she kept to herself. There,
alone with an old servant who died a year or so later, she walked the
floor of that mockery of a house, or sat brooding over the coming of the
child. It must have been pleasant! Emily was born just before we heard
of the captain's death.

"One or two of her nearest friends tried to comfort her, but she would
see no one except the doctor--who, by the way was my father. I have
inherited the Draingers, you see."

Fawcett's cigar was out, but he did not light another.

"My mother, from whom I got all this, said there was something
magnificent in the way Mrs. Drainger suffered, in the way she resented
any intrusion upon her self-imposed solitude. My mother was a courageous
woman, but she said she was positively frightened when Mrs. Drainger, a
tall, fair woman with straight, level eyes, came to the door in answer
to her knock.

"'You may go back, Lucy Fawcett,' she said. 'A rebel has no friends,'
and shut the door in my mother's mortified face.

"At first there was some grumbling and ill-natured talk, but it soon
ceased. People who knew her family (she was a Merion) saw pretty clearly
that Mrs. Drainger's heart had, for most purposes, stopped beating when
the captain found the bullet he was looking for, and tumbled from his
horse. What was left was the magnificent shell of a woman in that great
shell of a house--that, and the child.