“Considering it a great privilege to be permitted to do so, I presume,” Mr. Travilla remarked, a little sarcastically.

“Of course; for cool impudence Enna certainly exceeds every other person of my acquaintance.”

“You must let us share the privilege.”

“Thanks; but we will talk of that at another time.  I know you and Elsie have dreaded the bad influence of Enna’s spoiled children upon yours; and I, too, have feared it for them, and for Rosebud; but there is to be no communication between theirs and ours; Louise’s one set, and Enna’s two, keeping to their own side of the building and grounds, and ours not intruding upon them.  Enna had it all arranged, and simply made the announcement to me, probably with little idea of the relief she was affording.”

“It is a great relief,” said Elsie.  “Aunt Lora’s are better trained, and will not——­”

“They do not remain with us; Pinegrove is still habitable, and they are here only for to-day to welcome us home.”

Elsie’s face lighted up with pleasure.  “And we shall have our own dear home to ourselves, after all!  Ah, how foolish I have been to so borrow trouble.”

“I have shared the folly,” her father said, smiling; “but let us be wiser for the future.  They have already retired to their own quarters, and you will see no more of them for the present.  My father remains with us.”

Mrs. Howard was deeply mortified by the conduct of her sisters, but tried to excuse them to those whom they were treating with such rudeness and ingratitude.

“Louise and Enna are very bitter,” she said, talking with Rose and Elsie in the drawing-room after tea; “but they have suffered much in the loss of their husbands and our brothers; to say nothing of property.  Sherman’s soldiers were very lawless—­some of them, I mean; and they were not all Americans—­and inflicted much injury.  Enna was very rude and exasperating to the party who visited Roselands, and was roughly handled in consequence; robbed of her watch and all her jewelry and money.

“They treated our poor old father with great indignity also; dragged him down the steps of the veranda, took his watch, rifled his pockets, plundered the house, then set it on fire and burned it to the ground.”

Her listeners wept as she went on to describe more minutely the scenes of violence at Roselands, Ashlands, Pinegrove, and other plantations and towns in the vicinity; among them the residences of the pastor and his venerable elder, whose visits were so comforting to Mrs. Travilla in her last sickness.

“They were Union men,” Lora said, in conclusion, “spending their time and strength in self-denying efforts for the spiritual good of both whites and blacks, and had suffered much at the hands of the Confederates; yet were stripped of everything by Sherman’s troops, threatened with instant death, and finally left to starve, actually being without food for several days.”