having lived long
enough to see the conflict work ruin to his fortunes. The son had been
offered employment in New York by a relative who had sympathised with
the South in her struggle; and he had gone away from Clarendon. The
old family "mansion"--it was not a very imposing structure, except by
comparison with even less pretentious houses--had been sold upon
foreclosure, and bought by an ambitious mulatto, who only a few years
before had himself been an object of barter and sale. Entering his
uncle's office as a clerk, and following his advice, reinforced by a
sense of the fitness of things, the youthful colonel had dropped his
military title and become plain Mr. French. Putting the past behind
him, except as a fading memory, he had thrown himself eagerly into the
current of affairs. Fortune favoured one both capable and energetic.
In time he won a partnership in the firm, and when death removed his
relative, took his place at its head.

He had looked forward to the time, not very far in the future, when he
might retire from business and devote his leisure to study and travel,
tastes which for years he had subordinated to the pursuit of wealth;
not entirely, for his life had been many sided; and not so much for
the money, as because, being in a game where dollars were the
counters, it was his instinct to play it well. He was winning already,
and when the bagging trust paid him, for his share of the business, a
sum double his investment, he found himself, at some years less than
fifty, relieved of business cares and in command of an ample fortune.

This change in the colonel's affairs--and we shall henceforth call him
the colonel, because the scene of this story is laid in the South,
where titles are seldom ignored, and where the colonel could hardly
have escaped his own, even had he desired to do so--this change in the
colonel's affairs coincided with that climacteric of the mind, from
which, without ceasing to look forward, it turns, at times, in wistful
retrospect, toward the distant past, which it sees thenceforward
through a mellowing glow of sentiment. Emancipated from the counting
room, and ordered South by the doctor, the colonel's thoughts turned
easily and naturally to the old town that had given him birth; and he
felt a twinge of something like remorse at the reflection that never
once since leaving it had he set foot within its borders. For years he
had been too busy. His wife had never manifested any desi