“He said he was going back to Dixie’s Land, and didn’t say no more.”

That was all.  His departure had been as abrupt and unlocked for as his arrival.  I wondered if he would turn up again at the end of another twenty years, and I wondered how he had paid his travelling expenses to the land of the magnolia and the persimmon.  That mystery was solved a few days subsequently when a draft (for so reasonable a sum as not to be worth mentioning to Clara) was presented to me for payment at my office.

Washington Flagg was gone, but his shadow was to linger for a while longer on our household.  It was difficult to realize that the weight which had oppressed us had been removed.  We were scarcely conscious of how heavy it had been until it was lifted.  I was now and then forced to make an effort not to expect the colonel to dinner.

A month or two after his disappearance an incident occurred which brought him back very vividly and in a somewhat sinister shape to our imaginations.  Quite late one night there was a sharp ring at the door.  Mary having gone to bed, I answered the bell.  On the doorstep stood a tall, pale girl, rather shabbily dressed, but with a kind of beauty about her; it seemed to flash from her eyelashes, which I noticed were very heavy.  The hall light fell full upon this slight figure, standing there wrapped in an insufficient shawl, against a dense background of whirling snowflakes.  She asked if I could give her Colonel Flagg’s address.  On receiving my reply, the girl swiftly descended the steps, and vanished into the darkness.  There was a tantalizing point of romance and mystery to all this.  As I slowly closed the front door I felt that perhaps I was closing it on a tragedy—­one of those piteous, unwritten tragedies of the great city.  I have wondered a thousand times who that girl was and what became of her.

Before the end of the year another incident—­this time with a touch of comedy—­lighted up the past of my kinsman.  Among the travelling agents for the Savonarola Fire Insurance Company was a young man by the name of Brett, Charles Brett, a new employee.  His family had been ruined by the war, and he had wandered North, as the son of many a Southern gentleman had been obliged to do, to earn his living.  We became friends, and frequently lunched together when his business brought him to the city.  Brett had been in the Confederate army, and it occurred to me one day to ask him if he had ever known my cousin the colonel.  Brett was acquainted with a George W. Flagg; had known him somewhat intimately, in fact; but it was probably not the same man.  We compared notes, and my Flagg was his Flagg.

“But he wasn’t a colonel,” said Brett.  “Why, Flagg wasn’t in the war at all.  I don’t fancy he heard a gun fired, unless it went off by accident in some training-camp for recruits.  He got himself exempt from service in the field by working in the government saltworks.  A heap of the boys escaped conscription that way.”