It was not unknown that these two families should intermarry, a Fairfax finding a wife among the Beauchamps, or perchance a Beauchamp coming to the Fairfax home to find a mistress for his own household.  It was considered a matter of course that young Henry Fairfax, son of Colonel Fairfax, should, after completing his studies at the ancient institution of William and Mary College, step into his father’s law office, eventually to be admitted to the bar and to become his father’s partner; after which he should marry Miss Ellen Beauchamp, loveliest daughter of a family noted for its beautiful women.  So much was this taken for granted, and so fully did it meet the approval of both families, that the tide of the young people’s plans ran on with little to disturb its current.  With the gallantry of their class the young men of the plantations round about, the young men of the fastidiously best, rode in to ask permission of Mary Ellen’s father to pay court to his daughter.  One by one they came, and one by one they rode away again, but of them all not one remained other than Mary Ellen’s loyal slave.  Her refusal seemed to have so much reason that each disappointed suitor felt his own defeat quite stingless.  Young Fairfax seemed so perfectly to represent the traditions of his family, and his future seemed so secure; and Mary Ellen herself, tall and slender, bound to be stately and of noble grace, seemed so eminently fit to be a Beauchamp beauty and a Fairfax bride.

For the young people themselves it may be doubted if there had yet awakened the passion of genuine, personal love.  They met, but, under the strict code of that land and time, they never met alone.  They rode together under the trees along the winding country roads, but never without the presence of some older relative whose supervision was conventional if careless.  They met under the honeysuckles on the gallery of the Beauchamp home, where the air was sweet with the fragrance of the near-by orchards, but with correct gallantry Henry Fairfax paid his court rather to the mother than to the daughter.  The hands of the lovers had touched, their eyes had momentarily encountered, but their lips had never met.  Over the young girl’s soul there sat still the unbroken mystery of life; nor had the reverent devotion of the boy yet learned love’s iconoclasm.

For two years Colonel Fairfax had been with his regiment, fighting for what he considered the welfare of his country and for the institutions in whose justice he had been taught to believe.  There remained at the old Fairfax home in Louisburg only the wife of Colonel Fairfax and the son Henry, the latter chafing at a part which seemed to him so obviously ignoble.  One by one his comrades, even younger than himself, departed and joined the army hastening forward toward the throbbing guns.  Spirited and proud, restive under comparisons which he had never heard but always dreaded to hear.  Henry Fairfax begged his mother to let him go, though still she said, “Not yet.”