When Elphinstone was sold, it brought less than the debts on it.  The old plate, with the Keith coat-of-arms on it, from which generations of guests had been served, and which old Richard, the butler, had saved during the war, went for its weight in silver.  The library had been pillaged until little of it remained.  The old Keith pictures, some of them by the best artists, which had been boxed and stored elsewhere until after the war, now went to the purchaser of the place for less than the price of their frames.  Among them was the portrait of the man in the steel coat and hat, who had the General’s face.

What General Keith felt during this transition no one, perhaps, ever knew; certainly his son did not know it, and did not dream of it until later in life.

It was, however, not only in the South that fortunes were lost by the war.  As vast as was the increase of riches at the North among those who stayed at home, it did not extend to those who took the field.  Among these was a young officer named Huntington, from Brookford, a little town on the sunny slope that stretches eastwardly from the Alleghanies to the Delaware.  Captain Huntington, having entered the army on the outbreak of the war, like Colonel Keith rose to the rank of general, and, like General Keith, received a wound that incapacitated him for service.  His wife was a Southern woman, and had died abroad, just at the close of the war, leaving him a little girl, who was the idol of his heart.  He was interested in the South, and came South to try and recuperate from the effects of his wound and of exposure during the war.

The handsomest place in the neighborhood of Elphinstone was “Rosedale,” the family-seat of the Berkeleys.  Mr. Berkeley had been killed in the war, and the plantation went, like Elphinstone and most of the other old estates, for debt.  And General Huntington purchased it.

As soon as General Keith heard of his arrival in the neighborhood, he called on him and invited him to stay at his house until Rosedale should be refurnished and made comfortable again.  The two gentlemen soon became great friends, and though many of the neighbors looked askance at the Federal officer and grumbled at his possessing the old family-seat of the Berkeleys, the urbanity and real kindness of the dignified, soldierly young officer soon made his way easier and won him respect if not friendship.  When a man had been a general at the age of twenty-six, it meant that he was a man, and when General Keith pronounced that he was a gentleman, it meant that he was a gentleman.  Thus reasoned the neighbors.

His only child was a pretty little girl of five or six years, with great brown eyes, yellow curls, and a rosebud face that dimpled adorably when she laughed.  When Gordon saw her he recognized her instantly as the tot who had given her doll to the little dancer two years before.  Her eyes could not be mistaken.  She used to drive about in the tiniest of village carts, drawn by the most Liliputian of ponies, and Gordon used to call her “Cindy,”—­short for Cinderella,—­which amused and pleased her.  She in turn called him her sweetheart; tyrannized over him, and finally declared that she was going to marry him.