e birthright of a Republic was mine as well
as the General's, and I knew that among a free people it was the mettle
of the man that would count in the struggle. In the fight between
democratic ideals and Old World institutions I had no fear, even to-day,
of what the future would bring. The right of a man to make his own
standing was all that I asked.

And yet the long waiting! As I walked one Sunday afternoon over to
Church Hill, after a visit to Jessy (who was living now with a friend of
the doctor's), I asked myself again and again if Sally had read my heart
that last afternoon and had seen in it the reason of my fierce reserve.
Jessy had been affectionate and very pretty--she was a cold, small,
blond woman, with a perfect face and the manner of an indifferent
child--but she had been unable to wean me from the thought which
returned to take royal possession as soon as the high pressure of my
working day was relaxed. It controlled me utterly from the moment I put
the question of the stock market aside; and it was driving me now, like
the ghost of an unhappy lover, back for a passionate hour in the
enchanted garden.

The house was half closed when I reached it, though the open shutters to
the upper windows led me to believe that some of the rooms, at least,
were tenanted. When I entered the gate and passed the stuccoed wing to
the rear piazza, I saw that the terraces were blotted and ruined as if
an invading army had tramped over them. The magnolias and laburnums,
with the exception of a few lonely trees, had already fallen; the
latticed arbours were slowly rotting away; and several hardy
rose-bushes, blooming bravely in the overgrown squares, were the only
survivals of the summer splendour that I remembered. Turning out of the
path, I plucked one of these gallant roses, and found it pale and
sickly, with a November blight at the heart. Only the great elms still
arched their bared branches unchanged against a red sunset; and now as
then the small yellow leaves fluttered slowly down, like wounded
butterflies, to the narrow walks.

I had left the upper terrace and had descended the sunken green steps,
when the dry rustle of leaves in the path fell on my ears, and turning a
fallen summer house, I saw Sally approaching me through the broken maze
of the box. A colour flamed in her face, and pausing in the leaf-strewn
path, she looked up at me with shining and happy eyes.

"It has been so long since I saw you," she said,