much a state as any of the great states of Europe, as Britain, as France, as Spain, and jealously ever since have we individually regarded any infringement on our integrity.  That, and not the mere tangle of race that in time must unravel itself, is the question of the age.  Long ago it was said that our people, holding it by transmission, never having struggled for it, would some day cease rightly to value the one chief bulwark of liberty.  Nothing is more true.  They of the North will lose it, we of the South shall gain it; for, battling on a grander scale than our ancestors, the South is to-day taking out the great habeas corpus of States!”

No matter whether all this was sophistry or truth.  Beltran had said it,—­that was enough; so strongly did she feel his personality in what he wrote, that the soul was exultant, jubilant, defiant, within her.  Other words there were in the letter, such words as are written to but one; the blood swept up to Vivia’s lips as she recalled them, and her heart sprang and bounded like one of those balls kept in perpetual play by the leaping, bubbling column of a fountain.  She was in one of those dangerous states of excitement after which the ancients awaited disaster.  That last picture of the mirror dazzled her vision again; she saw the sunshine, smelt the perfume, heard the bird-song.  How a year had changed the scene!  The house was a barrack; now down in her Maryland peach-orchards the black muzzles of Federal cannon yawned, and under the flickering shadows and sunshine the grimy gunners, knee-deep in grass and dew, brushed away the startled clover-blooms, as they touched fire to the breach.  Beltran was a Rebel.  Vivia was a Rebel, too!  She ran down-stairs into her little parlor overflowing with flowers.  As she walked to and fro, the silent keys of her pianoforte met her eye.  Excellent conductors.  Half standing, half sitting, she awoke its voices, and, to a rolling, silvery thunder of accompaniment, commenced singing,—­

    “The lads of Kilmarnock had swords and had spears
    And lang-bladed daggers to kill cavaliers,
    But they shrunk to the wall and the causey left free
    At one toss of the bonnet of Bonny Dundee! 
      So fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
      Saddle my horses and call up my men,
      Open your west-port and let me gae free,
      For it’s up with the bonnets of Bonny Dundee!”

Some one in the distance, echoing the last line with an emphasis, caught her ear in the pause.  It was Ray.  He had already returned, then.  She snatched the letter and sped into the kitchen, where she was sure to find him.

Mrs. Vennard rocked in her miniature sitting-room at one side, contentedly matching patchwork.  Little Jane Vennard, her step-daughter,—­usually at work in the mills, but, since their close, making herself busy at home, whither she had brought a cookery-book through which Ray declared he expected to eat his way,—­bustled about from room to room.  Ray sat before the fire in the kitchen and toasted some savory morsel suspended on a string athwart the blaze.