The coupe rattled over the stones or swirled through the muddy pools of the main thoroughfares.  Newspaper and telegraphic offices were still brilliantly lit, and crowds were gathered among the bulletin boards.  He knew that news had arrived from Washington that evening of the first active outbreaks of secession, and that the city was breathless with excitement.  Had he not just come from the theatre, where certain insignificant allusions in the play had been suddenly caught up and cheered or hissed by hitherto unknown partisans, to the dumb astonishment of a majority of the audience comfortably settled to money-getting and their own affairs alone?  Had he not applauded, albeit half-scornfully, the pretty actress—­his old playmate Susy—­who had audaciously and all incongruously waved the American flag in their faces?  Yes! he had known it; had lived for the last few weeks in an atmosphere electrically surcharged with it—­and yet it had chiefly affected him in his personal homelessness.  For his wife was a Southerner, a born slaveholder, and a secessionist, whose noted prejudices to the North had even outrun her late husband’s politics.  At first the piquancy and recklessness of her opinionative speech amused him as part of her characteristic flavor, or as a lingering youthfulness which the maturer intellect always pardons.  He had never taken her politics seriously—­why should he?  With her head on his shoulder he had listened to her extravagant diatribes against the North.  He had forgiven her outrageous indictment of his caste and his associates for the sake of the imperious but handsome lips that uttered it.  But when he was compelled to listen to her words echoed and repeated by her friends and family; when he found that with the clannishness of her race she had drawn closer to them in this controversy,—­that she depended upon them for her intelligence and information rather than upon him,—­he had awakened to the reality of his situation.  He had borne the allusions of her brother, whose old scorn for his dependent childhood had been embittered by his sister’s marriage and was now scarcely concealed.  Yet, while he had never altered his own political faith and social creed in this antagonistic atmosphere, he had often wondered, with his old conscientiousness and characteristic self-abnegation, whether his own political convictions were not merely a revulsion from his domestic tyranny and alien surroundings.

In the midst of this gloomy retrospect the coupe stopped with a jerk before his own house.  The door was quickly opened by a servant, who appeared to be awaiting him.

“Some one to see you in the library, sir,” said the man, “and”—­He hesitated and looked towards the coupe.

“Well?” said Clarence impatiently.

“He said, sir, as how you were not to send away the carriage.”

“Indeed, and who is it?” demanded Clarence sharply.

“Mr. Hooker.  He said I was to say Jim Hooker.”