brighter part of his
character up to the light. He performed miracles of valor--achieved for
himself a name and a post-captain's rank in the infant navy and finally
was permitted to retire with a bullet lodged under his shoulder blade, a
piece of silver trepanned in the top of his skull, a deep sword-cut
across his face from the right temple over his nose to the left
cheek--and with the honorary title of commodore.

He was a perfect beauty about this time, no doubt, but that did not
prevent him from receiving the hand of his cousin Henrietta Kalouga, who
had waited for him many a weary year.

No children blessed his late marriage, and as year after year passed,
until himself and his wife were well stricken in years, people, who
never lost interest in the great estate, began to wonder to which among
his tribe of impoverished relations Nickolas Waugh would bequeath the
manor of Luckenough.

His choice fell at length upon his orphan grandniece, the beautiful
Edith Lance, whom he took from the Catholic Orphan Asylum, where she had
found refuge since the death of her parents and placed in one of the
best convent schools in the South.

At the age of seventeen Edith was brought home from school and
established at Luckenough as the adopted daughter and acknowledged
heiress of her uncle.

Delicate, dreamy and retiring, and tinged with a certain pensiveness,
the effect of too much early sorrow and seclusion upon a very sensitive
temperament, Edith better loved the solitude of the grand old forest of
St. Mary's or the loneliness of her own shaded rooms at Luckenough than
any society the humdrum neighborhood could offer her. And when at the
call of social duty she did go into company, she exercised a refining
and subduing influence, involuntary as it was potent.

Yet in that lovely, fragile form, in that dreaming, poetical soul, lay
undeveloped a latent power of heroism soon to be aroused into action.
"Darling of all hearts and eyes," Edith had been at home a year when the
War of 1812 broke out.

Maryland, as usual, contributed her large proportion of volunteers to
the defense of the country. All men capable of bearing arms rapidly
mustered into companies and hastened to put themselves at the disposal
of the government.

The lower counties of Maryland were left comparatively unprotected. Old
men, women, children and negroes were all that remained in charge of the
farms and plantations. Yet remote from the scenes of confl