They were up at the little meadow-side cottage of Mrs. Vennard, Ray’s maternal aunt, a quiet widow, who was glad to receive her dying sister in her house a year and a half ago, as she had often received her boys before, and who was still willing to eke out her narrow income with the board of one nephew and any summer guest; and as that summer guest, owing to an old family-friendship that overlooked differences of rank and wealth, Vivia had, for many a season, been established.  Here, when bodings of trouble began to darken her sunny fields, she had, in early spring, withdrawn again, leaving her maiden aunt to attend to the affairs of the homestead, or to find more luxurious residence in watering-places or cities, as she chose.  For Vivia liked the placid life and freedom of the cottage, and here, too, she had oftenest met those dear friends to whom one winter her father, long since dead, had taken her, and half of all that was pleasant in her life had inwoven itself with the simple surroundings of the place.  Here, in that fatal spring when the first tocsin alarmed the land, Ray, now scarcely any longer a boy, yet with a boy’s singleness of mind, though possessing neither patience nor power for subtilties of difficult reason and truth, thinking of no lonely portion, but of the one great fact of country, had been fired with spontaneous fervor, and had ever since been like some restive steed champing the bit and quivering to start.  As for Vivia, she was a Maryland woman.  Too burningly indignant, the blood bubbled in her heart for words sometimes, and she would be glad of Beltran’s weapons with which to confront Kay when he returned from Boston, whither, the day before, without a word’s explanation, he had betaken himself.  So she turned again to the open letter, and scanned its weightiest paragraphs.

“There is a strange reversal of right and wrong, when the American Peace Society declares itself for war.  There is, then, a greater evil than war, even than civil war, with its red, fratricidal hands?—­Slavery.  But, could that be destroyed, it would be the first great evil ever overcome by force of arms.  They fight tangibly with an intangible foe; tangible issues rise between them; the black, intangible phantom hovers safe behind.  But even should they visibly succeed, is there not left the very root of the matter to put forth fresh growth,—­that moral condition in which the thing lived at all?  An evil that has its source in the heart must be eradicated by slow medicinal cure of the blood.  To fight against the stars in their courses, one must have brands of starry temper.  No sudden shocks of battle will sweep Slavery from the sphere.  Can one conquer the universe by proclamation?  ’Lyra will rise to-morrow,’ said some one, after Caesar reformed the calendar.  ‘Doubtless,’ replied Cicero, ‘there is an edict for it.’  But, believe me, there can be no broad, stupendous evil, unless it be a part of God’s plan; and in His own time, without other help from us than the performance of our duty, it will slough off its slime and rise into some fair superstructure.  Our efforts dash like spray against the rock,—­the spray is broken, the rock remains.  To annihilate evil with evil,—­that is an error in itself against which every man is justified in taking up his sword.