Twenty years ago, when the general had first brought home his young wife, before her buoyancy had faltered, and before the five little head-boards to the five stillborn children had been set up amid the periwinkle in the family graveyard, Aunt Griselda had written from the home of her sister to say that she would stop over at Battle Hall on her way to Richmond.

The general had received the news joyfully, and the best chamber had been made ready by the hospitable hands of his young wife.  Delicate, lavender-scented linen had been put on the old tester-bed and curtains of flowered chintz tied back from the window seats.  Amelia Battle had placed a bowl of tea-roses upon the dressing table and gone graciously down to the avenue to welcome her guest.  From the family carriage Aunt Griselda had emerged soured and eccentric.  She had gone up to the best chamber, unpacked her trunks, hung up her bombazine skirts in the closet, ordered green tea and toast, and settled herself for the remainder of her days.  That was twenty years ago, and she still slept in the best chamber, and still ordered tea and toast at the table.  She had grown sourer with years and more eccentric with authority, but the general never failed to treat her crotchets with courtesy or to open the door for her when she came and went.  To the mild complaints of Miss Chris and the protestations of Eugenia he returned the invariable warning:  “She is our guest—­remember what is due to a guest, my dears.”

And when Miss Chris placidly suggested that the privileges of guestship wore threadbare when they were stretched over twenty years, and Eugenia fervently hoped that there were no visitors in heaven, the general responded to each in turn: 

“It is the right of a guest to determine the length of his stay, and, as a Virginian, my house is open as long as it has a roof over it.”

So Aunt Griselda drank her green tea in acrid silence, turning at intervals to reprove Bernard for taking too large mouthfuls or to request Eugenia to remove her elbows from the table.

To-day, when Eugenia descended, she was gazing stonily into Miss Chris’s genial face, and listening constrainedly to a story at which the general was laughing heartily.

“Yes, I never look at these forks of the bead pattern that I don’t see Aunt Callowell,” Miss Chris was concluding.  “She never used any other pattern, and I remember when Cousin Bob Baker once sent her a set of teaspoons with a different border, she returned them to Richmond to be exchanged.  Do you remember the time she came to mother’s when we were children, Tom?  Eugie, will you have breast or leg?”

“I don’t think I could have been at home,” said the general, his face growing animated, as it always did, in a discussion of old times; “but I do remember once, when I was at Uncle Robert’s, they sent me eighteen miles on horseback for the doctor, because Aunt Callowell had such a queer feeling in her side when she started to walk.  I can see her now holding her side and saying:  ’I can’t possibly take a step!  Robert, I can’t take a step!’ And when I brought the doctor eighteen miles from home, on his old gray mare, he found that she’d put a shoe on one foot and a slipper on the other.”