It was for her father’s sake, of course, that Virginia bore with him.  Such is the appointed lot of women.  She tried to be just, and it occurred to her that she had never before been just.  Again and again she repeated to herself that Eliphalet’s devotion to the Colonel at this low ebb of his fortunes had something in it of which she did not suspect him.  She had a class contempt for Mr. Hopper as an uneducated Yankee and a person of commercial ideals.  But now he was showing virtues,—­if virtues they were,—­and she tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.  With his great shrewdness and business ability, why did he not take advantage of the many opportunities the war gave to make a fortune?  For Virginia had of late been going to the store with the Colonel,—­who spent his mornings turning over piles of dusty papers, and Mr. Hopper had always been at his desk.

After this, Virginia even strove to be kind to him, but it was uphill work.  The front door never closed after one of his visits that suspicion was not left behind.  Antipathy would assert itself.  Could it be that there was a motive under all this plotting?  He struck her inevitably as the kind who would be content to mine underground to attain an end.  The worst she could think of him was that he wished to ingratiate himself now, in the hope that, when the war was ended, he might become a partner in Mr. Carvel’s business.  She had put even this away as unworthy of her.

Once she had felt compelled to speak to her father on the subject.

“I believe I did him an injustice, Pa,” she said.  “Not that I like him any better now.  I must be honest about that.  I simply can’t like him.  But I do think that if he had been as unscrupulous as I thought, he would have deserted you long ago for something more profitable.  He would not be sitting in the office day after day making plans for the business when the war is over.”

She remembered how sadly he had smiled at her over the top of his paper.

“You are a good girl, Jinny,” he said.

Toward the end of July of that second summer riots broke out in the city, and simultaneously a bright spot appeared on Virginia’s horizon.  This took the form, for Northerners, of a guerilla scare, and an order was promptly issued for the enrollment of all the able-bodied men in the ten wards as militia, subject to service in the state, to exterminate the roving bands.  Whereupon her Britannic Majesty became extremely popular, —­even with some who claimed for a birthplace the Emerald Isle.  Hundreds who heretofore had valued but lightly their British citizenship made haste to renew their allegiance; and many sought the office of the English Consul whose claims on her Majesty’s protection were vague, to say the least.  Broken heads and scandal followed.  For the first time, when Virginia walked to the store with her father, Eliphalet was not there.  It was strange indeed that Virginia defended him.