Uncle Jake’s wrinkled, black face lost the expression of amusement to which he had vainly twisted it.  He knew that he was being teased, and that it made little real difference, as far as its safety went, into which of those outstretched hands he placed the family treasure.  But it seemed to him that not only his own pride and loyalty but much of the Virginia Carterets’ was at stake.  He had heard down South during the war about that other branch of the family that lived in the North and fought on “the yuther side,” and it had always grieved him.  He had followed his “old marster’s” fortunes from stately luxury through war to almost poverty.  And now, with the last relic and reminder of him, blessed by “old missus,” and intrusted implicitly to his care, he had come ten thousand miles (as it seemed) to deliver it into the hands of the one who was to wear it and wind it and cherish it and listen to it tick off the unsullied hours that marked the lives of the Carterets—­of Virginia.

His experience and conception of the Yankees had been an impression of tyrants—­“low-down, common trash”—­in blue, laying waste with fire and sword.  He had seen the smoke of many burning homesteads almost as grand as Carteret Hall ascending to the drowsy Southern skies.  And now he was face to face with one of them—­and he could not distinguish him from his “young marster” whom he had come to find and bestow upon him the emblem of his kingship—­even as the arm “clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful” laid Excalibur in the right hand of Arthur.  He saw before him two young men, easy, kind, courteous, welcoming, either of whom might have been the one he sought.  Troubled, bewildered, sorely grieved at his weakness of judgment, old Jake abandoned his loyal subterfuges.  His right hand sweated against the buckskin cover of the watch.  He was deeply humiliated and chastened.  Seriously, now, his prominent, yellow-white eyes closely scanned the two young men.  At the end of his scrutiny he was conscious of but one difference between them.  One wore a narrow black tie with a white pearl stickpin.  The other’s “four-in-hand” was a narrow blue one pinned with a black pearl.

And then, to old Jake’s relief, there came a sudden distraction.  Drama knocked at the door with imperious knuckles, and forced Comedy to the wings, and Drama peeped with a smiling but set face over the footlights.

Percival, the hater of mill supplies, brought in a card, which he handed, with the manner of one bearing a cartel, to Blue-Tie.

“Olivia De Ormond,” read Blue-Tie from the card.  He looked inquiringly at his cousin.

“Why not have her in,” said Black-Tie, “and bring matters to a conclusion?”

“Uncle Jake,” said one of the young men, “would you mind taking that chair over there in the corner for a while?  A lady is coming in—­on some business.  We’ll take up your case afterward.”

The lady whom Percival ushered in was young and petulantly, decidedly, freshly, consciously, and intentionally pretty.  She was dressed with such expensive plainness that she made you consider lace and ruffles as mere tatters and rags.  But one great ostrich plume that she wore would have marked her anywhere in the army of beauty as the wearer of the merry helmet of Navarre.