ught Lady Ida,
left alone in her hot-house warmth among the white and scarlet blossoms,
a little startled, a little disappointed, a little excited with some
vague apprehension, she could not have told why; while Bertie Winton
went on out into the cold gray winter's morning from the old
Northamptonshire Hall that would know him no more, with no end so likely
for him as that which had just been prophesied--a shot in a gambling
hell.

_Facilis descensus Averni_--and he was at the bottom of the pit. Well,
the descent had been very pleasant. Bertie set his teeth tight, and let
the waters close over his head and shut him out of sight. He knew that a
man who is down has nothing more to do with the world, save to quietly
accept--oblivion.

* * * * *

It was a hot summer night in Secessia.

The air was very heavy, no wind stirring the dense woods crowning the
sides of the hills or the great fields of trodden maize trampled by the
hoofs of cavalry and the tramp of divisions. The yellow corn waved above
the earth where the dead had fallen like wheat in harvest-time, and the
rice grew but the richer and the faster because it was sown in soil
where slaughtered thousands rotted, unsepulchred and unrecorded. The
shadows were black from the reared mountain range that rose frowning in
the moonlight, and the stars were out in southern brilliancy, shining as
calmly and as luminously as though their rays did not fall on graves
crammed full with dead, on flaming homesteads, crowded sick-wards,
poisonous waters that killed their thousands in deadly rivalry with shot
and shell, and vast battalions sleeping on their arms in wheat-fields
and by river-swamps, in opposing camps, and before beleaguered cities,
where brethren warred with brethren, and Virginia was drenched with
blood. There was no sound, save now and then the challenge of some
distant picket or the faint note of a trumpet-call, the roar of a
torrent among the hills, or the monotonous rise and fall from miles away
in the interior, of the negroes' funeral song, "Old Joe,"--more
pathetic, somehow, when you catch it at night from the far distance
echoing on the silence as you sit over a watch-fire, or ride alone
through a ravine, than many a grander requiem.

It was close upon midnight, and all was very still; for they were in the
heart of the South, and on the eve of a perilous enterprise, coined by a
bold brain and to be carried out by a bold hand