All at the table had listened absorbedly to this strange revelation, and Jack rose from the table shocked and discouraged.

Olympia seated herself at the piano, and, slipping out, as he supposed, unseen, Jack strolled off into the fragrant alleys of oleander and laurel.  Dick, however, was at his heels.  The two continued on in silence, Dick trolling along, switching the bugs from the pink blossoms that filled the air with an enervating odor.

“I say.  Jack, I’ve found out something.”

“What have you found out, you young conspirator?”

“Wesley Boone’s trying to get the negroes to help him off.”

“The devil he is!”

“Yes.  Last night I was down in the rose-fields.  Young Clem, Aunt Penelope’s boy, was sitting under a bush talking with a crony.  I heard him say, ‘De cap’n’ll take you, too, ef you doan say noffin’.  He guv Pompey ten gold dollars.’

“‘De Lor’!  Will he take ev’ybody ‘long, too, Clem?’

“‘Good Lor’, no!  He’s goin’ to get his army, and den he’ll come an’ fetch all de niggahs.’

“‘De Lor’!’

“Trying to get closer, I made a rustling of the bushes, and the young imps shot through them like weasles before I could lay hands on them.  Now, what do you think of that?”

“If it is only to escape, all right; but if it is an attempt to stir up insurrection, I will stop Wesley myself, rather than let him carry it out!”

“Wouldn’t it be the best thing to warn Vincent?  It would be a dreadful thing to let him go and leave his poor mother and sister here unprotected.”

“Let me think it over.  I will hit on some plan to keep Wesley from making an ingrate of himself without bringing danger on our benefactors.”

Kate was dawdling on the lawn as the two returned to the house.  Jack challenged her to a jaunt.

“Where shall it be?” she asked, readily, moving toward him.  “The garden of the gods?”

“The garden of the goddesses, you mean, if it is the rose-field.”

“That’s true; a god’s garden would be filled with thorns and warlike blossoms.”

“I don’t know; a rose-garden grew the wars of the houses of York and Lancaster.”

“Do you remember the scene in Shakespeare where Bolingbroke and Gaunt pluck the roses?”

“Quite well.  There is always something pathetic to me in the fables historians invent to excuse or palliate, or, perhaps it would be juster to say, make tolerable, the stained pages of the past.  It is brought doubly nearer and distinct by this miserable war, and the strange fate that has fallen upon us—­to be the guests of a family whose hopes are fixed upon what would make us miserable if it ever happened.”

“It never will.  That’s the reason I listen with pity to the childish vauntings of these kind people.  They have, you see, no conception of the Northern people—­no idea of the deep-seated purpose that moves the States as one man to stifle this monstrous attempt.”