The general shook his head.

“If she wasn’t almost as tall as I, I shouldn’t believe it,” he declared, “though she’s as old as her mother was when I married her.”

Eugenia seated herself upon the bench, still holding the trowel in her hand.  She was watching the interest in her father’s face, and she realised, half resentfully, that it was evoked by Dudley Webb.

He had drawn the general’s favourite anecdotes from him, and they had plunged together into a discussion of the good old days.  After a few light words she sat silent, listening with tender attention to the threadbare stories on the one side and the hearty applause of them on the other.  She wondered wistfully why Dudley and herself were the only persons who understood as well as loved the general.  Why was it Dudley, and not Nicholas, who brought that youthful look to his face and the heartiness to his voice?

“Some one was telling me the other day—­I think it was Colonel Preston—­that he fought beside you at Seven Pines,” Dudley was saying with that absorption in his subject which won him a friend in every man who told him a joke.

“Jake Preston!” exclaimed the general.  “Why, bless my soul!  I’ve slept under the same blanket with Jake Preston twenty times.  I was standing by him when he got that bullet in his thigh.  Did he tell you?”

Eugenia rose in a moment and went back to her flowers.  As she passed she threw a grateful glance at Dudley, but when she reached the garden it was of Nicholas she was thinking.  There was a glow at her heart that kept alive the memory of his eyes as he looked at her in the wood, of his voice when he called her name, of his hand when it brushed her own.

She fell happily to work, and when Dudley came out, an hour later, to find her, she was singing softly as she uprooted a scarlet geranium.

He smiled and looked down on her with frank enjoyment of her ripening womanhood, but it did not occur to him to join in the transplanting as Nicholas would have done.  He held off and absorbed the picture.

“You do papa so much good!” said Eugenia gratefully.  “I hope you will come out whenever you are in Kingsborough.”

She was kneeling upon the ground, her hands buried in the flower-bed, her firm arms rising white above the rich earth.  The line of her bosom rose and fell swiftly, and her breath came in soft pants.  There was a flush in her cheeks.

“If you wish it I will come,” he answered impulsively.  “I will come to Kingsborough every week if you wish it.”

His temperament responded promptly to the appeal of her beauty, and his blood quickened as it did when women moved him.  There was about him, withal, a fantastic chivalry which succumbed to the glitter of false sentiment.  He would have made the remark had Eugenia been plain—­but he would not have come to Kingsborough.

“It would please your mother,” returned the girl quietly.  She had the sexual self-poise of the Virginia woman, and she weighed the implied compliment at its due value.  Had he declared he would die for her once a week, she would have received the assurance with much the same smiling indifference.