Rounding a hill a few minutes later, the school-master saw far ahead the ancestral home of the Pendletons, where the stern old head of the house, but lately passed in his ninetieth year, had wielded patriarchal power.  The old general had entered the Mexican War a lieutenant and come out a colonel, and from the Civil War he had emerged a major-general.  He had two sons—­twins—­and for the twin brothers he had built twin houses on either side of the turnpike and had given each five hundred acres of land.  And these houses had literally grown from the soil, for the soil had given every stick of timber in them and every brick and stone.  The twin brothers had married sisters, and thus as the results of those unions Gray’s father and Marjorie’s father were double cousins, and like twin brothers had been reared, and the school-master marvelled afresh when he thought of the cleavage made in that one family by the terrible Civil War.  For the old general carried but one of his twin sons into the Confederacy with him—­the other went with the Union—­and his grandsons, the double cousins, who were just entering college, went not only against each other, but each against his own father, and there was the extraordinary fact of three generations serving in the same war, cousin against cousin, brother against brother, and father against son.  The twin brothers each gave up his life for his cause.  After the war the cousins lived on like brothers, married late, and, naturally, each was called uncle by the other’s only child.  In time the two took their fathers’ places in the heart of the old general, and in the twin houses on the hills.  Gray’s father had married an aristocrat, who survived the birth of Gray only a few years, and Marjorie’s father died of an old wound but a year or two after she was born.  And so the balked affection of the old man dropped down through three generations to centre on Marjorie, and his passionate family pride to concentrate on Gray.

Now the old Roman was gone, and John Burnham looked with sad eyes at the last stronghold of him and his kind—­the rambling old house stuccoed with aged brown and covered with ancient vines, knotted and gnarled like an old man’s hand; the walls three feet thick and built as for a fort, as was doubtless the intent in pioneer days; the big yard of unmown blue-grass and filled with cedars and forest trees; the numerous servants’ quarters, the spacious hen-house, the stables with gables and long sloping roofs and the arched gateway to them for the thoroughbreds, under which no hybrid mule or lowly work-horse was ever allowed to pass; the spring-house with its dripping green walls, the long-silent blacksmith-shop; the still windmill; and over all the atmosphere of careless, magnificent luxury and slow decay; the stucco peeled off in great patches, the stable roofs sagging, the windmill wheelless, the fences following the line of a drunken man’s walk, the trees storm-torn, and the mournful cedars harping with every passing