your
sister."

He had expected her to ask this, for the subject seemed to have an
inexhaustible charm for her. She would sit rapt and motionless as long
as he cared to talk of his sister, in her wide, meditative eyes the
shadow of a great unvoiced longing. It always seemed to make her grave
and thoughtful, he had noticed, so he had tried lately to avoid the
topic, and to-night in particular he wanted to do so, for this was no
time for melancholy. He had not even allowed himself to think, as yet,
and there were reasons why he did not wish her to do so; thought and
realization and a readjustment of their relations would come after
to-night, but this was the hour of illusion, and it must not be broken;
therefore he began to tell her of other people and of his youth, making
his tales as fanciful as possible, choosing deliberately to foster the
merry humor in which they had been all day. He told her of his father,
the crotchety old soldier, whose absurd sense of duty and whose
elaborate Southern courtesy had become a byword in the South. He told
her household tales that were prized like pieces of the Burrell plate,
beautiful heirlooms of sentiment that mark the honor of high-blooded
houses; following which there was much to recount of the Meades, from
the admiral who fought as a boy in the Bay of Tripoli down to the
cousin who was at Annapolis; the while his listener hung upon his words
hungrily, her mind so quick in pursuit of his that it spurred him
unconsciously, her great, dark eyes half closed in silent laughter or
wide with wonder, and in them always the warmth of the leaping
firelight blended with the trust of a new-born virginal love.

Without realizing it, the young man drifted further than he had
intended, and further than he had ever allowed himself to go before,
for in him was a clean and honest pride of birth, like his mother's
glory in her forebears, the expression of which he had learned to
repress, inasmuch as it was a Dixie-land conceit and had been
misunderstood when he went North to the Academy. In some this would
have seemed bigoted and feminine, this immoderate admiration for his
own blood, this exaggerated appreciation of his family honor, but in
this Southern youth it was merely the unconscious commendation of an
upright manliness for an upright code. When he had finished, the girl
remarked, with honest approval:

"What a fine you are. Those people of yours have all been good men and
women, haven't