The last Dudley of the Virginian line withstood, through several stormy years, the united appeals of his daughter and her lover.  In the end he yielded, subdued by opposition and gout, retaining the strength to insert but a single stipulation in the marriage contract, to the effect that his daughter should drop the name of Jane and be known as Dudley in her husband’s household.  To this the dashing bridegroom acquiesced with readiness, and when, within a year of the wedding, his wife presented him with a son, he called the boy, as he called the mother, by her maiden name.

He was a jovial young buck, who lived in his cards and his cups and loathed a quarrel as he loved a fight.

When the war between the States arose he went with Virginia, caring little for either cause, but conscious that his heart was where his home was.  So he kissed the young mother and the boy at her side and rode lightly away with a laugh upon his lips, to fall as lightly in the mad charge of cavalry at Brandy Station.

When the news came Jane Dudley listened to it in silence, her hands clasping the worsteds she was winding.  After the words were spoken she laid the worsteds carefully aside, stooping to pick up a fallen ball.  Then she crossed the room and went upstairs.

She said little, refusing herself alike to consolation and to acquaintances, spending her days in the shuttered house with her boy beside her.  When he fretted at the restraint she tied a band of crepe on his little jacket and sent him to play on the green, while she took up her worsteds again and finished the muffler she had been crocheting.  If she wept it was in secret, when the lights were out.

Some years later the house was sold over her head, but when she stood, penniless, upon the threshold it was to cross it as haughtily as she had done as a bride.  The stiff folds of her black silk showed no wavering ripple, the repose of her lips betrayed no tremor.  The smooth, high pompadour of her black hair passed as proudly beneath the arched doorway as it had done in the days of her wifehood and Julius Webb.

Her neighbours opened their wasted stores to her need, and out of their poverty offered her abundance, but she put aside their proffered assistance and undertook, unaided, the support and education of her child, maintaining throughout the struggle her air of unflinching irony.  She moved into a small white frame house opposite the church, and let out her spare rooms to student boarders.  Her pride was never lowered and her crepe was never laid aside.  She sat up far into the night to darn the sleeves of her black silk gown, but the stitches were of such exquisite fineness that in the dim light of her drawing-room they seemed but an added gloss.