any people
should have thought that. Yes, and Richard himself. It never was; and I
know I am no coquette!"

"No. You are not a coquette. Ideas like that arrive, one never knows
how--like thistledown in the air--and suddenly they are planted and hard
to uproot. Stafford himself breathed it somehow. That offends you,
naturally; but I should say there was never a man more horribly in love!
It was perhaps a fixed idea with him that he would win you, and others
misread it. Well, I am sorry for him! But I like Richard best, and he
will make you happier."

He talked on, in his dry, attractive voice, moving beside her slender,
wiry, resolute, trained muscle and nerve, from head to foot. "I was at
the Officer's Hospital this morning to see Carewe. He was wounded at
Port Republic, and his son and an old servant got him here somehow. He
was talking about Richard. He knew his father. He says he'll be a
brigadier the first vacancy, and that, if the war lasts, he won't stop
there. He'll go very high. You know Carewe?--how he talks? 'Yes, by God,
sir, Dick Cleave's son's got the stuff in him! Always was a kind of
dumb, heroic race. Lot of iron ore in that soil, some gold, too. Only
needed the prospector, Big Public Interest, to come along. Shouldn't
wonder if he carved his name pretty high on the cliff.'--Now, Judith, I
have stopped beneath this lamp just to see you look the transfigured
lover--happier at praise of him than at garlands and garlands for
yourself!--Hm! Drawn to the life. Now we'll go on to the President's
House."

The President's House on Shockoe Hill was all alight, men and women
entering between white pillars, from the long windows music floating.
Beyond the magnolias and the garden the ground dropped suddenly. Far and
wide, a vast horizon, there showed the eastern sky, and far and wide,
below the summer stars, there flared along it a reddish light--the
camp-fires of two armies, the grey the nearer, the blue beyond. Faint,
faint, you could hear the bugles. It was a dark night; no moon, only the
flicker of fireflies in magnolias and roses and the gush of light from
the tall, white-pillared house. The violins within were playing
"Trovatore." Warwick Cary, an aide with him, came from the direction of
the Capitol and joined his daughter and brother. The three entered
together.

There was little formality in these gatherings at the White House of the
Confederacy. The times were too menacing, the city too conversant wi