ry, Redfield, Garvin and two or three Europeans then visiting in
Richmond. Prescott, afar in a corner of the room, watched her covertly.
She was animated by some unusual spirit and her eyes were brilliant; her
speech, too, was scintillating. The little circle sparkled with
laughter and jest. They undertook to taunt her, though with good humour,
on her Northern sympathies, and she replied in like vein, meeting all
their arguments and predicting the fall of Richmond.

"Then, Miss Catherwood, we shall all come to you for a written
protection," said Garvin.

"Oh, I shall grant it," she said. "The Union will have nothing to fear
from you."

But Garvin, unabashed at the general laugh on himself, returned to the
charge. Prescott wandered farther away and presently was talking to Mrs.
Markham, Harley being held elsewhere by bonds of courtesy that he could
not break. Thus eddies of the crowd cast these two, as it were, upon a
rock where they must find solace in each other or not at all.

Mrs. Markham was a woman of wit and beauty. Prescott often had remarked
it, but never with such a realizing sense. She was young, graceful, and
with a face sufficiently supplied with natural roses, and above all keen
with intelligence. She wore a shade of light green, a colour that
harmonized wonderfully with the green tints that lurked here and there
in the depths of her eyes, and once when she gazed thoughtfully at her
hand Prescott noticed that it was very white and well shaped. Well,
Harley was at least a man of taste.

Mrs. Markham was pliable, insinuating and complimentary. She was
smitten, too, by a sudden mad desire. Always she was alive with coquetry
to her finger tips, and to-night she was aflame with it. But this quiet,
grave young man hitherto had seemed to her unapproachable. She used to
believe him in love with Helen Harley; now she fancied him in love with
some one else, and she knew his present frame of mind to be vexed
irritation. Difficult conquests are those most valued, and here she saw
an opportunity. He was so different from the others, too, that, wearied
of easy victories, all her fighting blood was aroused.

Mrs. Markham was adroit, and did not begin by flattering too much nor by
attacking any other woman. She was quietly sympathetic, spoke guardedly
of Prescott's services in the war, and made a slight allusion to his
difference in temperament from so many of the careless young men who
fought without either forethou