ays of Virginia into her lesser ones. A
century ago he might have left his plough to fight, and, having fought,
might have returned thereto; but the battle would have tingled in his
blood and the furrows have gone crooked. He would have ploughed, not for
love of the plough, but because the time for the sowing of the grain had
come.

Now he walked rapidly to his work, seeing Eugenia in the woods, in the
sunshine, in the very clouds lifted high above. The thought of her
surrounded him as an atmosphere.

As for the girl, she rode home and spent the long day in the garden
potting plants for the winter. When she came into the hall in the early
afternoon, with her trowel in her hand and her sleeves rolled back from
her white arms, her father called her to the porch, and, going out, she
found Dudley Webb in one of the cane chairs. He sprang to his feet as
she reached the threshold, and held out his hand, but she laughed and
showed the earth that clung to her wrists. "Unclean! unclean!" she cried
gaily. Her face had flushed from its warm pallor and her hair hung low
upon her forehead. A long streak of clay lay across her skirt where she
had knelt in the flower-bed.

He seized her protesting hand, admiration lighting his eyes. "Why,
little Eugie is a woman!" he exclaimed. "Can you grasp it, General?"

The general shook his head.

"If she wasn't almost as tall as I, I shouldn't believe it," he
declared, "though she's as old as her mother was when I married her."

Eugenia seated herself upon the bench, still holding the trowel in her
hand. She was watching the interest in her father's face, and she
realised, half resentfully, that it was evoked by Dudley Webb.

He had drawn the general's favourite anecdotes from him, and they had
plunged together into a discussion of the good old days. After a few
light words she sat silent, listening with tender attention to the
threadbare stories on the one side and the hearty applause of them on
the other. She wondered wistfully why Dudley and herself were the only
persons who understood as well as loved the general. Why was it Dudley,
and not Nicholas, who brought that youthful look to his face and the
heartiness to his voice?

"Some one was telling me the other day--I think it was Colonel
Preston--that he fought beside you at Seven Pines," Dudley was saying
with that absorption in his subject which won him a friend in every man
who told him a joke.

"Jake Preston!" exclaimed the ge