ke's wrinkled, black face lost the expression of amusement to
which he had vainly twisted it. He knew that he was being teased, and
that it made little real difference, as far as its safety went, into
which of those outstretched hands he placed the family treasure. But it
seemed to him that not only his own pride and loyalty but much of the
Virginia Carterets' was at stake. He had heard down South during the war
about that other branch of the family that lived in the North and fought
on "the yuther side," and it had always grieved him. He had followed
his "old marster's" fortunes from stately luxury through war to almost
poverty. And now, with the last relic and reminder of him, blessed by
"old missus," and intrusted implicitly to his care, he had come ten
thousand miles (as it seemed) to deliver it into the hands of the one
who was to wear it and wind it and cherish it and listen to it tick off
the unsullied hours that marked the lives of the Carterets--of Virginia.

His experience and conception of the Yankees had been an impression of
tyrants--"low-down, common trash"--in blue, laying waste with fire and
sword. He had seen the smoke of many burning homesteads almost as grand
as Carteret Hall ascending to the drowsy Southern skies. And now he was
face to face with one of them--and he could not distinguish him from his
"young marster" whom he had come to find and bestow upon him the emblem
of his kingship--even as the arm "clothed in white samite, mystic,
wonderful" laid Excalibur in the right hand of Arthur. He saw before him
two young men, easy, kind, courteous, welcoming, either of whom might
have been the one he sought. Troubled, bewildered, sorely grieved at
his weakness of judgment, old Jake abandoned his loyal subterfuges.
His right hand sweated against the buckskin cover of the watch. He
was deeply humiliated and chastened. Seriously, now, his prominent,
yellow-white eyes closely scanned the two young men. At the end of his
scrutiny he was conscious of but one difference between them. One wore a
narrow black tie with a white pearl stickpin. The other's "four-in-hand"
was a narrow blue one pinned with a black pearl.

And then, to old Jake's relief, there came a sudden distraction. Drama
knocked at the door with imperious knuckles, and forced Comedy to the
wings, and Drama peeped with a smiling but set face over the footlights.

Percival, the hater of mill supplies, brought in a card, which he
handed, with the m