The sky had faded swiftly to pale orange; the distant buildings appeared to swim toward him in the silver air; and the naked trees barred the white slopes with violet shadows.  In the topmost branches of an old sycamore the thinnest fragment of a new moon hung trembling like a luminous thread.  The twilight was intensely still, and the noises of the city fell with a metallic sound on his ears, as if a multitude of bells were ringing about him.  While he walked on past the bald outline of the restored and enlarged Capitol, this imaginary concert grew gradually fainter, until he heard above it presently the sudden closing of a window in the Governor’s mansion—­as the old gray house was called.

Pausing abruptly, the young man frowned as his eyes fell on the charming Georgian front, which presided like a serene and spacious memory over the modern utilitarian purpose that was devastating the Square.  Alone in its separate plot, broad, low, and hospitable, the house stood there divided and withdrawn from the restless progress and the age of concrete—­a modest reminder of the centuries when men had built well because they had time, before they built, to stop and think and remember.  The arrested dignity of the past seemed to the young man to hover above the old mansion within its setting of box hedges and leafless lilac shrubs and snow-laden magnolia trees.  He saw the house contrasted against the crude surroundings of the improved and disfigured Square, and against the house, attended by all its stately traditions, he saw the threatening figure of Gideon Vetch.  “So it has come to this,” he thought resentfully, with his gaze on the doorway where a round yellow globe was shining.  Ragged frost-coated branches framed the sloping roof, and the white columns of the square side porches emerged from the black crags of magnolia trees.  In the centre of the circular drive, invaded by concrete, a white heron poured a stream of melting ice from a distorted throat.

The shutters were not closed at the lower windows, and the firelight flickered between the short curtains of some brownish muslin.  As Stephen passed the gate on his way down the hill, a figure crossed one of the windows, and his frown deepened as he recognized, or imagined that he recognized, the shadow of Gideon Vetch.

“Gideon Vetch!” At the sound of the name the young man threw back his head and laughed softly.  A Gideon Vetch was Governor of Virginia!  Here also, he told himself, half humorously, half bitterly, democracy had won.  Here also the destroying idea had triumphed.  In sight of the bronze Washington, this Gideon Vetch, one of “the poor white trash,” born in a circus tent, so people said, the demagogue of demagogues in Stephen’s opinion—­this Gideon Vetch had become Governor of Virginia!  Yet the placid course of Stephen’s life flowed on precisely as it had flowed ever since he could remember, and the dramatic hand of Washington had not fallen.  It was still so recent; it had come