ey were thieves and robbed us?
Who--who--_what_--can have so blinded you?"

He left the bed and moved to his most frequent seat, the north window.
Thence, in the western half of the view, he could see the three
counties' "mother of learning and useful arts," fair, large-grown
Rosemont, glistening on her green hills in each day's setting sun, a
lovely frontispiece to the ever-pleasant story of her master's redundant
prosperity. Her June fledglings were but just gone and she was in the
earliest days of her summer rest. "Enlarged and superbly equipped and
embellished," the newspapers said of her in laudatory headlines, and it
was true that "no expense had been spared." Not any other institution in
Dixie spread such royal feasts of reason and information for her
children, at lavish cost to herself, low price to them, and queenly
remuneration to the numerous members of the State Legislature who came
to discourse on Agriculture, Mining, Banking, Trade, Journalism,
Jurisprudence, Taxation, and Government.

How envied was Garnet! Gamble and Bulger were thrifty and successful,
but Gamble and Bulger had fled and envy follows not the fleeing.
Halliday had attained his ambition; was in the United States Senate; but
the boom had sent him there, "regardless of politics," to plead for a
deeper channel in the Swanee, a move that was only part of one of
Ravenel's amusing "deals," whereby he had procured at last the political
extinction of Cornelius Leggett. Moreover, for all the old General's
activities he had kept himself poor; almost as poor as he was
incorruptible; who could envy him? And Ravenel; Ravenel was still the
arbiter of political fortune, but it was part of his unostentatious
wisdom never to let himself be envied. But Garnet, amid all this
business depression upon which March looked down from his sick-room,
wore envy on his broad breast like a decoration. There were spots of
tarnish on his heavy gilding; not merely the elder Miss Kinsington, but
Martha Salter as well, had refused to say good-by to Mademoiselle
Eglantine on the eve of her final return to France; Fanny Ravenel had,
with cutting playfulness, asked Mrs. Proudfit, as that sister was
extolling the Major's vast public value, if she did not know perfectly
well that Rosemont was a political "barrel." And yet it was Garnet who
stood popularly as the incarnation of praiseworthy success.

John March, begrudged him none of his triumphs--at their price. Yet it
was bef