whatever you do, I love you. I love you in every way that I
know how to love ... but in the name of my God and yours and of my love
for you and your love for me ... I ask you--if you can--take me back to
the house--and don't enforce your victory."

The man straightened up and stood for a while, very drawn of feature and
pallid. He lifted a hand vaguely and the arm dropped again like dead
weight at his side. Without seeing them, he looked at the mirrored stars
in the fresh-water lake across the way and twice his lips moved, but
succeeded in forming no words.

At last his head came up with a sudden jerk and his utterance was
difficult.

"So you put it up to me, in the name of your God: to me who acknowledge
no God. You ask it in the name of generosity."

"No," she corrected him. "I'm not in a position to ask anything.... I
only suggest it. I'm too helpless even to plead."

She moved over a few paces and leaned for support against the gnarled
trunk of a scrub pine, watching him with a fascinated gaze as he stood
bracing himself against the inward storm under which his own world and
hers seemed rocking.

With the heavy and dolorous insistence of a muffled drum two thoughts
were hammering at his brain: her helplessness: his honor.

But he had never put honor underfoot, he argued against that voice; only
an arbitrary and little conception of honor.... Yet she could not rid
herself of that conception ... and she was helpless. If he took her now
into the possession of his life, he must take her, not with triumph but
as he might pick up a fallen dove, fluttering and wounded at his
feet--as an exquisitely fashioned vase which his hand had shattered.

He remembered their first meeting in Virginia and his wrath when she had
laughed at his narrative of the Newmarket cadets.

The Newmarket cadets!

His father had been one of them at fifteen. There came again to his
ears, across the interval of years, the voice of the old gentleman, so
long dead, telling that story in a house where traditions were strong
and hallowed.

Across a wheat field lay a Union battery which must be stormed and taken
at the bayonet's point. Wave after wave of infantry had gone forward and
broken under its belching of death. The line wavered. There must be a
steady--an unflinching--unit upon which to guide. The situation called
for a morale which could rise to heroism. General Breckenridge was told
that only the cadets from the Virginia Military Ins