n the icy embrace of
winter." This was admitted to be accurately literal, in spite of its
poetic daring.

Miss Caroline confessed homesickness to me after the first heavy snow.
She spoke as lightly of it as she should have done, but I could see that
her own land pulled at her heart with every blast that shook her
casements. No longer, however, was there even a second-cousin whose
hospitality she was free to claim, for Colonel Lucius Quintus Peavey,
C.S.A., now slept with his fathers in far-off Virginia, leaving behind
him only traditions and a little old sherry. The former Miss Caroline
had always shared with him, and a cask of the latter he bequeathed to
her with his love. And the valley being now void of her kin, she was
doubly an exile.

Such new desolation as she must have felt was masked under jesting
dispraise of our execrable Northern climate. Surely a land permitted to
congeal so utterly had forfeited the grace of its Maker.

Clem's lack of executive genius also earned a meed of my neighbor's
disparagement. He was a worthless, trifling "boy," an idling dreamer, an
irresponsible, inconsequent visionary, in whose baseless fancies it was
astounding that a woman of her years should fatuously place reliance.

I must confess that I was more than once guilty of irritation when Miss
Caroline spoke thus slightingly of her "boy"--of one who had been unable
to view himself as other than her personal property. Again and again it
seemed to me that, fine little creature that she was, her tone toward
Clem lacked the right feeling. I should not have demanded gratitude
precisely; at least no bald expression of it. But a manner of speech
denoting, if not wording, a recognition of his unswerving loyalty would
have accorded better with the estimate I had otherwise formed of her
character. The absence of any tone or word that even one so devoted as I
could construe to her advantage was puzzling in the extreme.

Still, feeling toward her as I did, I was compelled to excuse her as
best I might by attributing her hardness to an evil system now happily
abolished. But the nerves in my lost arm seemed to tingle with a secret
satisfaction when I thought of Clem's empty reward for his life-work and
remembered that I had helped, though ever so little, to free him and his
kind from a bond so unfortunate for each of the parties to it.

The winter deepened about us, chill and bleak and ravaging. The smoke
from our chimneys went up in tall