an
summer in the Virginia climate when an infinite peace and vast brooding
silence fill the earth and sky until one feels that words are a
sacrilege.

Neither of them spoke for minutes, and his heart grew bold in the
stillness. No girl could be still who was unmoved.

She was seated just in front of him on the left, with her hand idly
rippling the surface of the silvery waters, gazing at the wooded cliff on
the river banks clothed now in their gorgeous robes of yellow, purple,
scarlet, and gold.

The soft strains of distant music came from a band in the fort, and her
hand in the rippling water seemed its accompaniment.

Ben was conscious only of her presence. Every sight and sound of nature
seemed to be blended in her presence. Never in all his life had he seen
anything so delicately beautiful as the ripe rose colour of her cheeks,
and all the tints of autumn's glory seemed to melt into the gold of her
hair.

And those eyes he felt that God had never set in such a face before--rich
amber, warm and glowing, big and candid, courageous and truthful.

"Are you dead again?" she asked demurely.

"Well, as the Irishman said in answer to his mate's question when he fell
off the house, 'not dead--but spacheless.'"

He was quick to see the opening her question with its memories had made,
and took advantage of it.

"Look here, Miss Elsie, you're too honest, independent, and candid to play
hide-and-seek with me. I want to ask you a plain question. You've been
trying to pick a quarrel of late. What have I done?"

"Nothing. It has simply come to me that our lives are far apart. The gulf
between us is real and very deep. Your father was but yesterday a
slaveholder----"

Ben grinned:

"Yes, your slave-trading grandfather sold them to us the day before."

Elsie blushed and bristled for a fight.

"You won't mind if I give you a few lessons in history, will you?" Ben
asked softly.

"Not in the least. I didn't know that Southerners studied history," she
answered, with a toss of her head.

"We made a specialty of the history of slavery, at least. I had a dear old
teacher at home who fairly blazed with light on this subject. He is one of
the best-read men in America. He happens to be in jail just now. But I
haven't forgotten--I know it by heart."

"I am waiting for light," she interrupted cynically.

"The South is no more to blame for negro slavery than the North. Our
slaves were stolen from Africa by Yankee skippers.