--without emotion. "And what, my friends and
fellow-citizens," suddenly continued the Colonel, replacing his white
handkerchief in his coat-tail, "was the reason why my client, Mr.
Joseph Corbin--whose delicacy keeps him from appearing among these
mourners--comes here to bury all differences, all animosities, all petty
passions? Because he is a son of the South; because as a son of the
South, as the representative, and a distant connection, I believe, of
my old political friend, Major Corbin, of Nashville, he wishes here
and everywhere, at this momentous crisis, to sink everything in the one
all-pervading, all-absorbing, one and indivisible UNITY of the South in
its resistance to the Northern Usurper! That, my friends, is the great,
the solemn, the Christian lesson of this most remarkable occasion in my
professional, political, and social experience."

Whatever might have been the calmer opinion, there was no doubt that
the gallant Colonel had changed the prevailing illogical emotion of
Pineville by the substitution of another equally illogical, and Miss
Sally was not surprised when her father, touched by the Colonel's
allusion to his daughter's epistolary powers, insisted upon bringing
Joseph Corbin home with him, and offering him the hospitality of the
Dows mansion. Although the stranger seemed to yield rather from the fact
that the Dows were relations of the Jeffcourts than from any personal
preference, when he was fairly installed in one of the appropriately
gloomy guest chambers, Miss Sally set about the delayed work of
reconciliation--theoretically accepted by her father, and cynically
tolerated by her Aunt Miranda. But here a difficulty arose which she had
not foreseen. Although Corbin had evidently forgiven her defection on
that memorable evening, he had not apparently got over the revelation of
her giddy worldliness, and was resignedly apathetic and distrustful of
her endeavors. She was at first amused, and then angry. And her patience
was exhausted when she discovered that he actually seemed more anxious
to conciliate Julia Jeffcourt than her mother.

"But she spat in your face," she said, indignantly.

"That's so," he replied, gloomily; "but I reckoned you said something in
one of your letters about turning the other cheek when you were smitten.
Of course, as you don't believe it now," he added with his upward
glance, "I suppose THAT'S been played on me, too."

But here Miss Sally's spirit lazily rebelled.