“He was well punished,” retorted Stephen, “his own grandson was a Whig, and seems to have married a woman of spirit.”

“She had spirit,” said Virginia.  “I am sure that she did not allow my great-grandfather to kiss her—­unless she wanted to.”

And she looked up at him, half smiling, half pouting; altogether bewitching.

“From what I hear of him, he was something of a man,” said Stephen.  “Perhaps he did it anyway.”

“I am glad that Marlborough Street isn’t a crowded thoroughfare,” said Virginia.

When they had seen the dining room, with its carved mantel and silver door-knobs, and the ballroom in the wing, they came out, and Stephen locked the door again.  They walked around the house, and stood looking down the terraces,—­once stately, but crumbled now,—­where Dorothy had danced on the green on Richard’s birthday.  Beyond and below was the spring-house, and there was the place where the brook dived under the ruined wall,—­where Dorothy had wound into her hair the lilies of the valley before she sailed for London.

The remains of a wall that had once held a balustrade marked the outlines of the formal garden.  The trim hedges, for seventy years neglected, had grown incontinent.  The garden itself was full of wild green things coming up through the brown of last season’s growth.  But in the grass the blue violets nestled, and Virginia picked some of these and put them in Stephen’s coat.

“You must keep them always,” she said, “because we got them here.”

They spied a seat beside a hoary trunk.  There on many a spring day Lionel Carvel had sat reading his Gazette.  And there they rested now.  The sun hung low over the old-world gables in the street beyond the wall, and in the level rays was an apple tree dazzling white, like a bride.  The sweet fragrance which the day draws from the earth lingered in the air.

It was Virginia who broke the silence.

“Stephen, do you remember that fearful afternoon of the panic, when you came over from Anne Brinsmade’s to reassure me?”

“Yes, dear,” he said.  “But what made you think of it now?”

She did not answer him directly.

“I believed what you said, Stephen.  But you were so strong, so calm, so sure of yourself.  I think that made me angry when I thought how ridiculous I must have been.”

He pressed her hand.

“You were not ridiculous, Jinny.”  She laughed.

“I was not as ridiculous as Mr. Cluyme with his bronze clock.  But do you know what I had under my arm—­what I was saving of all the things I owned?”

“No,” he answered; “but I have often wondered.”  She blushed.

“This house—­this place made me think of it.  It was Dorothy Manners’s gown, and her necklace.  I could not leave them.  They were all the remembrance I had of that night at Mr. Brinsmade’s gate, when we came so near to each other.”

“Virginia,” he said, “some force that we cannot understand has brought us together, some force that we could not hinder.  It is foolish for me to say so, but on that day of the slave auction, when I first saw you, I had a premonition about you that I have never admitted until now, even to myself.”