And Patricia brazenly confessed that it did not.  She also made a face at him, and accused Rudolph Musgrave of trying to crawl out of marrying her, which proceeding led to frivolities unnecessary to record, but found delectable by the participants.

VIII

Colonel Musgrave was alone.  He had lifted his emptied coffee-cup and he swished the lees gently to and fro.  He was curiously intent upon these lees, considered them in the light of a symbol....

Then a comfortable, pleasant-faced mulattress came to clear the supper-table.  Virginia they called her.  Virginia had been nurse in turn to all the children of Rudolph Musgrave’s parents; and to the end of her life she appeared to regard the emancipation of the South’s negroes as an irrelevant vagary of certain “low-down” and probably “ornery” Yankees —­as an, in short, quite eminently “tacky” proceeding which very certainly in no way affected her vested right to tyrannize over the Musgrave household.

“Virginia,” said Colonel Musgrave, “don’t forget to make up a fire in the kitchen-stove before you go to bed.  And please fill the kettle before you go upstairs, and leave it on the stove.  Miss Agatha is not well to-night.”

“Yaas, suh.  I unnerstan’, suh,” Virginia said, sedately.

Virginia filled her tray, and went away quietly, her pleasant yellow face as imperturbable as an idol’s.

PART THREE — TERTIUS

  “It is in many ways made plain to us
  That love must grow like any common thing,
  Root, bud, and leaf, ere ripe for garnering
  The mellow fruitage front us; even thus
  Must Helena encounter Theseus
  Ere Paris come, and every century
  Spawn divers queens who die with Antony
  But live a great while first with Julius.

  “Thus I have spoken the prologue of a play
  Wherein I have no part, and laugh, and sit
  Contented in the wings, whilst you portray
  An amorous maid with gestures that befit
  This lovely role,—­as who knows better, pray,
  Than I that helped you in rehearsing it?”

Horace Symonds. Civic Voluntaries.

I

When the Presidential campaign was at its height; when in various sections of the United States “the boy orator of La Platte” was making invidious remarks concerning the Republican Party, and in Canton (Ohio) Mr. M.A.  Hanna was cheerfully expressing his confidence as to the outcome of it all; when the Czar and the Czarina were visiting President Faure in Paris “amid unparalleled enthusiasm”; and when semi-educated people were appraising, with a glibness possible to ignorance only, the literary achievements of William Morris and George du Maurier, who had just died:—­at this remote time, Roger Stapylton returned to Lichfield.