nstead of my going down town when we were
boys?"

"You are only a boy, now, Asher, and this is all I'll hear to your doing.
You ought to be thankful for having such a chance open to you. I have
leased the farm for five years and you don't want to be a hired man at
twenty dollars a month, I reckon. Of course, the farm will be yours some
day, unless you take a notion to run off to Virginia and marry a Thaine."

The last words were said jokingly, but Asher's mother saw a sudden
hardening of the lines of his face as he sat looking out at the darkening
landscape.

There was only a faint glow in the west now. The fields toward Cloverdale
were wrapped in twilight shadows. Behind the eastern treetops the red disk
of the rising moon was half revealed. Asher Aydelot waited long before he
spoke. At length, he turned toward his father with a certain stiffening of
his form, and each felt a space widening gulf-wise between them.

"You stayed at home and grew rich, Father."

"Well?"

The father's voice cut like a steel edge. He saw only opposition to his
will here, but the mother forecasted the end from that moment.

"Father, war gives us to see bigger things than hatred between two
sections of the country. There is education in it, too. That is a part of
the compensation. Once, when our regiment was captured and starving, the
Fifty-fourth Virginia boys saved our lives by feeding us the best supper I
ever tasted. And a Rebel girl--" he broke off suddenly.

"Well, what of all this? What are you trying to say?" queried the older
man.

"I'm trying to show you that I cannot sit down here in the Shirley House
and play mine host any more than I could--" hesitatingly--"marry a
Cloverdale girl on demand. No Cloverdale girl would have me so. I've seen
too much of the country for such a position, Father. Let the men who staid
at home do the little jobs."

He had not meant to say all this, but the stretch of boundless green
prairies was before his eyes, the memory of heroic action where men
utterly forget themselves was in his mind, making life in that little Ohio
settlement seem only a boy's pastime, to be put away with other childish
things. While night and day, in the battle clamor, in the little college
class room, on boundless prairie billows, among lonely sand
dunes--everywhere, he carried the memory of the gentle touch of the hand
of a rebel girl, who had visited him when he was sick and in prison. And
withal, he resented dict