uiet abundance of its delicate woodwork, and the high
spaciousness and continuity of its rooms for entertainment won
admiration and fame. A worthy setting, it was called, for the gentle
manners with which the Callenders made it alluring.

They, of course, had not built it. The late Judge had acquired it from
the descendants of a planter of indigo and coffee who in the oldest
Creole days had here made his home and lived his life as thoroughly in
the ancient baronial spirit as if the Mississippi had been the mediaeval
Rhine. Only its perfect repair was the Judge's touch, a touch so
modestly true as to give it a charm of age and story which the youth and
beauty of the Callender ladies only enhanced, enhancing it the more
through their lack of a male protector--because of which they were
always going to move into town, but never moved.

Here, some nine or ten days after Greenleaf's flight, Hilary Kincaid, in
uniform at last, was one of two evening visitors, the other being
Mandeville. In the meantime our lover of nonsense had received a "hard
jolt." So he admitted in a letter to his friend, boasting, however, that
it was unattended by any "internal injury." In the circuit of a single
week, happening to be thrown daily and busily into "her" society, "the
harpoon had struck."

He chose the phrase as an honest yet delicate reminder of the compact
made when last the two chums had ridden together.

All three of the Callenders were in the evening group, and the five
talked about an illumination of the city, set for the following night.
In the business centre the front of every building was already being
hung with fittings from sidewalk to cornice. So was to be celebrated the
glorious fact (Constance and Mandeville's adjective) that in the
previous month Louisiana had seized all the forts and lighthouses in her
borders and withdrawn from the federal union by a solemn ordinance
signed in tears. This great lighting up, said Hilary, was to be the
smile of fortitude after the tears. Over the city hall now floated daily
the new flag of the state, with the colors of its stripes--

"Reverted to those of old Spain," murmured Anna, mainly to herself yet
somewhat to Hilary. Judge Callender had died a Whig, and politics
interested the merest girls those days.

Even at the piano, where Anna played and Hilary hovered, in pauses
between this of Mozart and that of Mendelssohn, there was much for her
to ask and him to tell about; for instan