nd especially all women--are equal. Not that the young women now
streaming to the steamboat were Miss Floyd's equals. The notion was
absurd. All that appeared to be true was that Miss Floyd, in any
circumstances, would be, and was, the equal of anybody.

"How charming your friend is!" he said presently to Cecilia Boyson, as
they lingered on the veranda, waiting for the curator, in a scene now
deserted. "She tells me she is a teacher of music."

Cecilia Boyson looked at him in amazement, and made him repeat his
remark. As he did so, his uncle called him, and he turned away. Miss
Boyson leant against one of the pillars of the veranda, shaking with
suppressed laughter.

But at that moment the curator, a gentle, gray-haired man, appeared,
shaking hands with the General, and bowing to the ladies. He gave them a
little discourse on the house and its history, as they stood on the
veranda; and private conversation was no longer possible.

CHAPTER II

A sudden hush had fallen upon Mount Vernon. From the river below came
the distant sounds of the steamer, which, with its crowds safe on board,
was now putting off for Washington. But the lawns and paths of the
house, and the formal garden behind it, and all its simple rooms
upstairs and down, were now given back to the spring and silence, save
for this last party of sightseers. The curator, after his preliminary
lecture on the veranda, took them within; the railings across the doors
were removed; they wandered in and out as they pleased.

Perhaps, however, there were only two persons among the six now
following the curator to whom the famous place meant anything more than
a means of idling away a warm afternoon. General Hobson carried his
white head proudly through it, saying little or nothing. It was the
house of a man who had wrenched half a continent from Great Britain; the
English Tory had no intention whatever of bowing the knee. On the other
hand, it was the house of a soldier and a gentleman, representing old
English traditions, tastes, and manners. No modern blatancy, no Yankee
smartness anywhere. Simplicity and moderate wealth, combined with
culture--witness the books of the library--with land-owning, a family
coach, and church on Sundays: these things the Englishman understood.
Only the slaves, in the picture of Mount Vernon's past, were strange to
him.

They stood at length in the death-chamber, with its low white bed, and
its balcony overlooking the rive