friend, watching the
crescent beauty of face and mind with something of the pride and
tenderness which a man might feel for a young and favorite sister; and
then, at last, when some turn of affairs sent them all home to Virginia
to take lot and part there, he had thought of marriage.

His mind had turned, not unwillingly, from the town and its apples of
Sodom to his Virginia plantation that he had not seen for more than ten
years. It was his birthplace, and there he had spent his boyhood.
Sometimes, in heated rooms, when the candles in the sconces were guttering
down, and the dawn looked palely in upon gaming tables and heaped gold,
and seamed faces, haggardly triumphant, haggardly despairing, determinedly
indifferent, there had come to him visions of cool dawns upon the river,
wide, misty expanses of marsh and forest, indistinct and cold and pure.
The lonely "great house," too,--the house which his father had built with
so much love and pains, that his son and his son's sons should have a
worthy home,--appealed to him, and the garden, and the fishing-boats, and
the old slaves in the quarters. He told himself that he was glad to go
back.

Had men called him ambitious, he would have smiled, and felt truly that
they had bungled in the word. Such and such things were simply his
appurtenances; in London, the regard due to a gentleman who to a certain
distinction in his manner of amusing himself added the achievement of a
successful comedy, three lampoons quoted at all London tea-tables, and a
piece of Whig invective, so able, stern, and sustained that many cried
that the Dean had met his match; in Virginia, the deferential esteem of
the colony at large, a place in the Council, and a great estate. An
alliance with the master of Westover was in itself a desirable thing,
advantageous to purse and to credit; his house must have a mistress, and
that mistress must please at every point his fastidious taste.

What better to do than to give it for Mistress Evelyn Byrd? Evelyn, who
had had for all her suitors only a slow smile and shake of the head;
Evelyn, who was older than her years; Evelyn, who was his friend as he was
hers. Love! He had left that land behind, and she had never touched its
shores; the geography of the poets to the contrary, it did not lie in the
course of all who passed through life. He made his suit, and now he had
his answer.

If he did not take trouble to wonder at her confession, or to modestly ask
hims