“Because I dreamed of you,” he answered.  And those dreams used to linger with me half the day as I went about my work.  I used to think of them as I sat in the saddle on the march.”

“I, too, treasured them,” she said.  “And I hated myself for doing it.”

“Virginia, will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

“To-morrow?”

“Yes, dear, to-morrow.”  Faintly, “I have no one but you—­now.”

Once more he drew her to him, and she gloried in his strength.

“God help me to cherish you, dear,” he said, “and guard you well.”

She drew away from him, gently, and turned toward the window.

“See, Stephen,” she cried, “the sun has come out at last.”

For a while they were silent, looking out; the drops glistened on blade and leaf, and the joyous new green of the earth entered into their hearts.

CHAPTER XVI

ANNAPOLIS

It was Virginia’s wish, and was therefore sacred.  As for Stephen, he little cared whither they went.  And so they found themselves on that bright afternoon in mid-April under the great trees that arch the unpaved streets of old Annapolis.

They stopped by direction at a gate, and behind it was a green cluster of lilac bushes, which lined the walk to the big plum-colored house which Lionel Carvel had built.  Virginia remembered that down this walk on a certain day in June, a hundred years agone, Richard Carvel had led Dorothy Manners.

They climbed the steps, tottering now with age and disuse, and Virginia playfully raised the big brass knocker, brown now, that Scipio had been wont to polish until it shone.  Stephen took from his pocket the clumsy key that General Carvel had given him, and turned it in the rusty lock.  The door swung open, and Virginia stood in the hall of her ancestors.

It was musty and damp this day as the day when Richard had come back from England and found it vacant and his grandfather dead.  But there, at the parting of the stairs, was the triple-arched window which he had described.  Through it the yellow afternoon light was flooding now, even as then, checkered by the branches in their first fringe of green.  But the tall clock which Lionel Carvel used to wind was at Calvert House, with many another treasure.

They went up the stairs, and reverently they walked over the bare floors, their footfalls echoing through the silent house.  A score of scenes in her great-grandfather’s life came to Virginia.  Here was the room—­the cornet one at the back of the main building, which looked out over the deserted garden—­that had been Richard’s mother’s.  She recalled how he had stolen into it on that summer’s day after his return, and had flung open the shutters.  They were open now, for their locks were off.  The prie-dieu was gone, and the dresser.  But the high bed was there, stripped of its poppy counterpane and white curtains; and the steps by which she had entered it.