is apparently very different, yet the same.  The stern, beautiful woman who is arraying herself before her mirror, as a soldier assumes his arms and equipments, is the same with the thoughtless, pleasure-loving girl whom we first met in her drawing-room in June; but months of deep and almost tragic experience have called into activity latent forces received from her father’s soul,—­his power of sustained action, of resolute purpose, of cherishing high ideals, and of white, quiet anger.

Her toilet was scarcely completed when Willard Merwyn was announced.

CHAPTER XV.

Scorn.

It is essential that we should go back several hours in our story.  On the morning of the day that witnessed the departure of Strahan and his company Merwyn’s legal adviser had arrived and had been closeted for several hours with his client.  Mr. Bodoin was extremely conservative.  Even in youth he had scarcely known any leanings toward passion of any kind or what the world regards as folly.  His training had developed and intensified natural characteristics, and now to preserve in security the property intrusted to his care through a stormy, unsettled period had become his controlling motive.  He looked upon the ups and downs of political men and measures with what seemed to him a superior and philosophical indifference, and he was more than pleased to find in Merwyn, the son of his old client, a spirit so in accord with his own ideas.

They had not been very long together on this fateful day before he remarked:  “My dear young friend, it is exceedingly gratifying to find that you are level-headed, like your father.  He was a man, Willard, whom you do well to imitate.  He secured what he wanted and had his own way, yet there was no nonsense about him.  I was his intimate friend as well as legal adviser, and I know, perhaps, more of his life than any one else.  Your mother, to-day, is the handsomest woman of her years I ever saw, but when she was of your age her beauty was startling, and she had almost as many slaves among the first young men of the South as there were darkies on the plantation, yet your father quietly bore her away from them all.  What is more, he so managed as to retain her respect and affection to the last, at the same time never yielding an inch in his just rights or dignity, and he ever made Mrs. Merwyn feel that her just rights and dignity were equally sacred.  Proud as your mother was, she had the sense to see that his course was the only proper one.  Their marriage, my boy, always reminded me of an alliance between two sovereign and alien powers.  It was like a court love-match abroad.  Your father, a Northern man, saw the beautiful Southern heiress, and he sued as if he were a potentate from a foreign realm.  Well-born and accustomed to wealth all his life, he matched her pride with a pride as great, and made his offer on his feet as if he were conferring