ith awed and admiring eyes. Only Jessy still shrank from him,
and not once during his visit were we able to prevail upon her to appear
with him in the presence of strangers. There was always an excuse ready
to trip off her tongue--she had a headache, she was going to the
dressmaker's, the milliner's, the dentist's even; and I honestly believe
that she sought cheerfully this last place of torture as an escape. To
the end, however, he regarded her with an affection that fell little
short of adoration.

"Who'd have thought that little Jessy would have shot up into a regular
beauty!" he exclaimed for the twentieth time as he stood ready to
depart. "She takes arter pa, and I always said the only thing against pa
was that he wa'nt born a female."

He kissed her good-by in a reverential fashion, and after a cordial,
though exhausted, leave-taking from Sally, we went together to West
Virginia. In spite of the General's advice, I had decided to take a look
at the coal fields of Wyanoke, and a week later, when I returned to
Richmond, I was the owner of a control of the little West Virginia and
Wyanoke Railroad. It was a long distance from the presidency of the
Great South Midland and Atlantic, but I watched still from some vantage
ground in my imagination, the gleaming tracks of the big road sweeping
straight on to the southern horizon.

For the next few years there was hardly a shadow on the smiling surface
of our prosperity. Society had received us in spite of my father, in
spite even of my brother; and the day that had made me Sally's husband
had given me a place, if an alien one, in the circle in which she moved.
I was there at last, and it was neither her fault nor mine if I carried
with me into that stained-glass atmosphere something of the
consciousness of the market boy, who seemed to stand always at the
kitchen door. Curiously enough there were instants even now when I felt
vaguely aware that, however large I might appear to loom in my physical
presence, a part of me was, in reality, still on the outside, hovering
uncertainly beyond the threshold. There were things I had never
learned--would never learn; things that belonged so naturally to the
people with whom I lived that they seemed only aware of them when
brought face to face with the fact of their absence. The lightness of
life taught me nothing except that I was built in mind and in body upon
a heavier plan. At the dinner-table, when the airy talk floated about