k of many hands. Mrs. Gannat had
from the first given her heart to the Union cause. A woman of high
standing in society, well known throughout the State for her mind, her
manners, and her benevolence, it was not difficult for her, by adroit
management, to aid such prisoners as fell into rebel hands during the
early years of the war. Before Richmond became a mart in the modern
sense, the Gannat mansion, set far back among the trees of a noble
grove, was a shrine to the tradition loving citizens, for, beyond any
Southern city, save perhaps New Orleans, Richmond folk cherished the
memory of aristocratic and semi-regal ancestors. There were those still
living when the war began, who had heard their fathers and mothers talk
of the last royal Governor and the splendid state of the great noblemen
who had flocked to the city of Powhatan when Virginia was the gem of
England's colonial coronet. The patrician caste of the city still held
its own, aided by the helot hand of slavery. Among the most reverently
considered in this sanctified group, Mrs. Gannat was, if not first, the
conceded equal. She was the dowager of the ancient noblesse. The young
Virginian received in her drawing-rooms carried away a distinction which
was recognized throughout the State. The dame admitted to Mrs. Gannat's
semi-literary _levees_ was accepted as all that society demanded of
its votaries.

In other years this great lady had been the admired center of the court
circle in Washington. There she had known very intimately Senator--then
Congressman--Sprague. Jack remembered vaguely the gossip of an
engagement between his father and a famous Southern beauty; and when the
lady in the course of the conspiring said, as they talked, "My son, I
might have been your mother," he knew that this gentle-voiced,
kindly-eyed matron was the woman his father had loved and lost. I don't
propose to rehearse the ingenuities of the complicated plans whereby the
group we are interested in were to be delivered. Mrs. Gannat's perfect
knowledge of the city, her intimacy with the President, Cabinet, and
leading men, her vogue with the officials, all tended to make very
simple and easy that which would seem in the telling hare-brained and
impossible. Jack's unique position, and Dick's attitude of the
half-acknowledged _fiance_ of an Atterbury, broke down bars that even
Mrs. Gannat's far-reaching sagacity might not have been able to cope
with in certainty. The night chosen for the