motive he did not attempt to
fathom--in truth, he was not conscious at the time of any motive. He
heard the name shouted at the gate.

"Here they are,--the dragoons! Three cheers for Colfax! Down with the
Yankees!"

A storm of cheers and hisses followed. Dismounted, at the head of his
small following, the young Captain walked erect. He did not seem to hear
the cheers. His face was set, and he held his gloved hand over the place
where his sword had been, as if over a wound. On his features, in his
attitude, was stamped the undying determination of the South. How those
thoroughbreds of the Cavaliers showed it! Pain they took lightly. The
fire of humiliation burned, but could not destroy their indomitable
spirit. They were the first of their people in the field, and the last to
leave it. Historians may say that the classes of the South caused the
war; they cannot say that they did not take upon themselves the greatest
burden of the suffering.

Twice that day was the future revealed to Stephen. Once as he stood on
the hill-crest, when he had seen a girl in crimson and white in a window,
--in her face. And now again he read it in the face of her cousin. It was
as if he had seen unrolled the years of suffering that were to come.

In that moment of deep bitterness his reason wavered. What if the South
should win? Surely there was no such feeling in the North as these people
betrayed. That most dangerous of gifts, the seeing of two sides of a
quarrel, had been given him. He saw the Southern view. He sympathized
with the Southern people. They had befriended him in his poverty. Why had
he not been born, like Clarence Colfax, the owner of a large plantation,
the believer in the divine right of his race to rule?

Then this girl who haunted his thoughts! Would that his path had been as
straight, his duty as easy, as that of the handsome young Captain.

Presently these thoughts were distracted by the sight of a back strangely
familiar. The back belonged to a, gentleman who was energetically
climbing the embankment in front of him, on the top of which Major
Sexton, a regular, army officer, sat his horse. The gentleman was pulling
a small boy after him by one hand, and held a newspaper tightly rolled in
the other. Stephen smiled to himself when it came over him that this
gentleman was none other than that Mr. William T. Sherman he had met in
the street car the day before. Somehow Stephen was fascinated by the
decision and energy