sed very conspicuously."

"Do you imply that you were not?" inquired her father, without facetious
intention.

Mary Byrd beamed indulgently in his direction. "Oh, you don't know what
it is to be conspicuous, dear," she answered. "What did you think of her
dress, Stephen?"

He met her question with a blush. Was he really so modest after the war
and France and everything?--Victoria wondered in silence.

"It was something red, wasn't it?" he rejoined vaguely.

"It was scarlet tulle." Mary Byrd, as her mother had once observed,
"hadn't an indefinite bone in her body." Then she imparted an additional
incident. "She got it badly torn. I saw her pinning it up in the
dressing-room."

"I should have been sorry for her," said Margaret simply; and he felt
that he had never in his life been so nearly in love with her.

"Is she pretty?" asked Mrs. Culpeper, appealing directly to Stephen as
a man and an authority. It was the question the strange woman had put to
him in the Square, and ironical mirth seized the young man as he
remembered.

"Do you think her pretty, Stephen?" repeated Margaret, and waited, with
an expression of impartial interest, for his reply.

For an instant he hesitated. Did he think Patty Vetch pretty or not? "I
hardly know," he answered. "I suppose it depends upon whether you like
that kind of thing or not. Why don't you ask Peyton?" At the time he
couldn't have told himself whether he admired Patty or not. She
surprised him, she struck a new note, the note of the unexpected, but
whether he liked or disliked it, he could not tell. "There is something
unusual about her," he concluded hurriedly, feeling that he had not been
quite fair.

"Well, I think she's good looking enough," Peyton, the incurious young
man of "advanced" tastes, was replying. "She seems to have a kind of
fascination. I don't know what it is, but I dare say she inherited it
from her father. The Governor may be unsound in his views and uncertain
in his methods, but I've yet to see any one who could resist his smile."

"The Judge admires him," remarked Stephen, with the air of a man who
tosses a bomb into a legislative assembly.

"Oh, Stephen," protested Victoria on a high note of interrogation, "how
can he?"

"The Judge likes to keep up well with the times," observed Mr. Culpeper,
whose final argument against any innovation was the inquiry, "What do
you suppose General Lee would have thought of it?" Pausing an instant
while the fa