ation, as all the Aydelots and Penningtons before
him had done.

"What do you propose to do?" his father asked.

"I don't know yet what I can do. I only know what I cannot do."

"And that is--?"

"Just what I have said. I cannot be a tavern keeper here the rest of my
days with nothing to do half of the time except to watch the men pitch
horseshoes behind the blacksmith shop, and listen to the flies buzz in the
windows on summer afternoons; and everything else so quiet and dead you
don't know whether you are on the street or in the graveyard. If you'd
ever crossed the Mississippi River you'd understand why."

"Well, I haven't, and I don't understand. But the only way to stop this
roving is to make a home of your own. Will you tell me how you expect to
support a Cloverdale girl when you marry one?"

"I don't expect to marry one." The smile was winning, but the son's voice
sounded dangerously like the father's.

"Why not?"

"Because when I marry it will be to a southern girl--" Asher hesitated a
moment. When he went on, his voice was not as son to father, but as man to
man.

"It all happened down in Virginia, when I was wounded and in prison. This
little girl took care of me. Only a soldier really knows what a woman's
hand means in sickness. But she did more. She risked everything, even her
life, to get letters through the lines to you and to get me exchanged. I
shiver yet when I think of her, disguised as a man in soldier's clothes,
taking the chance she did for me. And, well, I left my heart down there.
That's all."

"Why haven't you ever told us this before, Asher?" his father asked.

Asher stood up where the white moonlight fell full on his face. Somehow
the old Huguenot defiance and the old Quaker endurance of his ancestors
seemed all expressed in him.

"I wasn't twenty-one, then, and I have nothing yet to offer a girl by way
of support," he said.

"Why, Asher!" Mrs. Aydelot exclaimed, "you have everything here."

"Not yet, mother," he replied. "And I haven't told you because her name is
Virginia Thaine, and she is a descendant of Jerome Thaine. Are the
Aydelots big enough to bury old hates?"

Francis Aydelot sat moveless as a statue. When at length he spoke, there
was no misunderstanding his meaning.

"You have no means by which to earn a living. You will go down to town and
take charge of the Shirley House at once, or go to work as a hired hand
here. But remember this: from the day you marry a Th