“Why isn’t he coming?” said Virginia, at last.

“Because he is to be one of the speakers at a big meeting that night.  Have you seen him since you got home, Jinny?  He is thinner than he was.  We are much worried about him, because he has worked so hard this summer.”

“A Black Republican meeting!” exclaimed Virginia, scornfully ignoring the rest of what was said.  “Then I’ll come, Anne dear,” she cried, tripping the length of the room.  “I’ll come as Titania.  Who will you be?”

She cantered off down the drive and out of the gate, leaving a very puzzled young woman watching her from the window.  But when Virginia reached the forest at the bend of the road, she pulled her horse down to a walk.

She bethought herself of the gown which her Uncle Daniel had sent her from Calvert House, and of the pearls.  And she determined to go as her great-grandmother, Dorothy Carvel.

Shades of romance!  How many readers will smile before the rest of this true incident is told?

What had happened was this.  Miss Anne Brinsmade had driven to town in her mother’s Jenny Lind a day or two before, and had stopped (as she often did) to pay a call on Mrs. Brice.  This lady, as may be guessed, was not given to discussion of her husband’s ancestors, nor of her own.  But on the walls of the little dining-room hung a Copley and two Stuarts.  One of the Stuarts was a full length of an officer in the buff and blue of the Continental Army.  And it was this picture which caught Anne’s eye that day.

“How like Stephen!” she exclaimed.  And added.  “Only the face is much older.  Who is it, Mrs. Brice?”

“Colonel Wilton Brice, Stephen’s grandfather.  There is a marked look about all the Brices.  He was only twenty years of age when the Revolution began.  That picture was painted much later in life, after Stuart came back to America, when the Colonel was nearly forty.  He had kept his uniform, and his wife persuaded him to be painted in it.”

“If Stephen would only come as Colonel Wilton Brice!” she cried.  “Do you think he would, Mrs. Brice?”

Mrs. Brice laughed, and shook her head.

“I am afraid not, Anne,” she said.  “I have a part of the uniform upstairs, but I could never induce him even to try it on.”

As she drove from shop to shop that day, Anne reflected that it certainly would not be like Stephen to wear his grandfather’s uniform to a ball.  But she meant to ask him, at any rate.  And she had driven home immediately to write her invitations.  It was with keen disappointment that she read his note of regret.

However, on the very day of the ball, Anne chanced to be in town again, and caught sight of Stephen pushing his way among the people on Fourth Street.  She waved her hand to him, and called to Nicodemus to pull up at the sidewalk.

“We are all so sorry that you are not coming,” said she, impulsively.  And there she stopped short.  For Anne was a sincere person, and remembered Virginia.  “That is, I am so sorry,” she added, a little hastily.  “Stephen, I saw the portrait of your grandfather, and I wanted you to come in his costume.”