When Sam left the ballroom there remained no person who was able to claim acquaintance with the little group who now sat under the shadow of the swinging lamp at the lower end of the hall, and farthest from the door.  Sam himself might have been more courteous had not his mental perturbation been so great.  As it was, the “grand march” was over, and Battersleigh was again walking along the lines in company with his friend Franklin, before either could have been said to have noticed fully these strangers, whom no one seemed to know, and who sat quite apart and unengaged.  Battersleigh, master of ceremonies by natural right, and comfortable gentleman at heart, spied out these three, and needed but a glance to satisfy himself of their identity.  Folk were few in that country, and Sam had often been very explicit in his descriptions.

“Sir,” said Battersleigh, approaching and bowing as he addressed the stranger, “I shall make bold to introjuce meself—­Battersleigh of Ellisville, sir, at your service.  If I am not mistaken, you will be from below, toward the next town.  I bid ye a very good welcome, and we shall all hope to see ye often, sir.  We’re none too many here yet, and a gintleman and his family are always welcome among gintlemen.  Allow me, sir, to presint me friend Captain Franklin, Captain Ned Franklin of the—­th’ Illinois in the late unplisantness.—­Ned, me boy, Colonel—­ye’ll pardon me not knowin’ the name?”

“My name is Buford, sir,” said the other as he rose.  “I am very glad to see you gentlemen.  Colonel Battersleigh, Captain Franklin.  I was so unlucky as to be of the Kentucky troops, sir, in the same unpleasantness.  I want to introduce my wife, gentlemen, and my niece, Miss Beauchamp.”

Franklin really lost a part of what the speaker was saying.  He was gazing at this form half hidden in the shadows, a figure with hands drooping, with face upturned, and just caught barely by one vagrant ray of light which left the massed shades piled strongly about the heavy hair.  There came upon him at that moment, as with a flood-tide of memory, all the vague longing, the restlessness, the incertitude of life which had harried him before he had come to this far land, whose swift activity had helped him to forget.  Yet even here he had been unsettled, unhappy.  He had missed, he had lacked—­he knew not what.  Sometimes there had come vague dreams, recurrent, often of one figure, which he could not hold in his consciousness long enough to trace to any definite experience or association—­a lady of dreams, against whom he strove and whom he sought to banish.  Whom he had banished!  Whom he had forgotten!  Whom he had never known!  Who had ever been in his life a vague, delicious mystery!