understood. It was the way the people of Piedmont
expressed to him and the world their contempt for the farce of an election
he had conducted, and their indifference as to the result he would
celebrate with many guns before midnight.

The young people of the town were out in force. Marion was a universal
favourite. The grace, charm, and tender beauty of the Southern girl of
sixteen were combined in her with a gentle and unselfish disposition. Amid
poverty that was pitiful, unconscious of its limitations, her thoughts
were always of others, and she was the one human being everybody had
agreed to love. In the village in which she lived wealth counted for
naught. She belonged to the aristocracy of poetry, beauty, and intrinsic
worth, and her people knew no other.

As she stood in the long dining-room, dressed in her first ball costume of
white organdy and lace, the little plump shoulders peeping through its
meshes, she was the picture of happiness. A half-dozen boys hung on every
word as the utterance of an oracle. She waved gently an old ivory fan with
white down on its edges in a way the charm of which is the secret
birthright of every Southern girl.

Now and then she glanced at the door for some one who had not yet
appeared.

Phil paid his tribute to her with genuine feeling, and Marion repaid him
by whispering:

"Margaret's dressed to kill--all in soft azure blue--her rosy cheeks,
black hair, and eyes never shone as they do to-night. She doesn't dance on
account of her Sunday-school--it's all for you."

Phil blushed and smiled.

"The preacher won't be here?"

"Our rector will."

"He's a nice old gentleman. I'm fond of him. Miss Marion, your mother is a
genius. I hope she can plan these little affairs oftener."

It was half-past ten o'clock when Ben Cameron entered the room with Elsie
a little ruffled at his delay over imaginary business at his office. Ben
answered her criticisms with a strange elation. She had felt a secret
between them and resented it.

At Mrs. Lenoir's special request, he had put on his full uniform of a
Confederate Colonel in honour of Marion and the poem her father had
written of one of his gallant charges. He had not worn it since he fell
that day in Phil's arms.

No one in the room had ever seen him in this Colonel's uniform. Its yellow
sash with the gold fringe and tassels was faded and there were two bullet
holes in the coat. A murmur of applause from the boys, sighs and
exclam