The incident I am narrating were the work of many hands.  Mrs. Gannat had from the first given her heart to the Union cause.  A woman of high standing in society, well known throughout the State for her mind, her manners, and her benevolence, it was not difficult for her, by adroit management, to aid such prisoners as fell into rebel hands during the early years of the war.  Before Richmond became a mart in the modern sense, the Gannat mansion, set far back among the trees of a noble grove, was a shrine to the tradition loving citizens, for, beyond any Southern city, save perhaps New Orleans, Richmond folk cherished the memory of aristocratic and semi-regal ancestors.  There were those still living when the war began, who had heard their fathers and mothers talk of the last royal Governor and the splendid state of the great noblemen who had flocked to the city of Powhatan when Virginia was the gem of England’s colonial coronet.  The patrician caste of the city still held its own, aided by the helot hand of slavery.  Among the most reverently considered in this sanctified group, Mrs. Gannat was, if not first, the conceded equal.  She was the dowager of the ancient noblesse.  The young Virginian received in her drawing-rooms carried away a distinction which was recognized throughout the State.  The dame admitted to Mrs. Gannat’s semi-literary levees was accepted as all that society demanded of its votaries.

In other years this great lady had been the admired center of the court circle in Washington.  There she had known very intimately Senator—­then Congressman—­Sprague.  Jack remembered vaguely the gossip of an engagement between his father and a famous Southern beauty; and when the lady in the course of the conspiring said, as they talked, “My son, I might have been your mother,” he knew that this gentle-voiced, kindly-eyed matron was the woman his father had loved and lost.  I don’t propose to rehearse the ingenuities of the complicated plans whereby the group we are interested in were to be delivered.  Mrs. Gannat’s perfect knowledge of the city, her intimacy with the President, Cabinet, and leading men, her vogue with the officials, all tended to make very simple and easy that which would seem in the telling hare-brained and impossible.  Jack’s unique position, and Dick’s attitude of the half-acknowledged fiance of an Atterbury, broke down bars that even Mrs. Gannat’s far-reaching sagacity might not have been able to cope with in certainty.  The night chosen for the escape was fatefully propitious.  The President was entertaining the newly arrived French delegate and the ministers Mason and Slidell, just appointed to the courts of St. James and the Tuileries.  Everybody that was anybody was of the splendid company.

Jack, however, was tortured by a doubt of Dick’s constancy when it came to an abrupt quitting of his sweetheart.  Poor lad, he fought the battle bravely, making no sign; and when Rosa, the picture of demure loveliness, in her girlish finery, asked him maliciously as the carriage drove toward the Executive Mansion—­