With this, my cousin strode off, tucking my note to Mrs. Wesley inside the leather belt buckled tightly around his waist.  I lingered a moment on the curbstone, and looked after him with a sensation of mingled pride, amusement, and curiosity.  That was my Family; there it was, in that broad back and those not ungraceful legs, striding up Sixth Avenue, with its noble intellect intent on thoughts of breakfast.  I was thankful that it had not been written in the book of fate that this limb of the closely pruned Wesley tree should be lopped off by the sword of war.  But as Washington Flagg turned into Clinton Place, I had a misgiving.  It was hardly to be expected that a person of his temperament, fresh from a four years’ desperate struggle and a disastrous defeat, would refrain from expressing his views on the subject.  That those views would be somewhat lurid, I was convinced by the phrases which he had dropped here and there in the course of our conversation.  He was, to all intents and purposes, a Southerner.  He had been a colonel in Stonewall Jackson’s brigade.  And Mrs. Wesley was such an uncompromising patriot!  It was in the blood.  Her great-grandfather, on the mother’s side, had frozen to death at Valley Forge in the winter of 1778, and her grandfather, on the paternal side, had had his head taken off by a round-shot from his Majesty’s sloop of war Porpoise in 1812.  I believe that Mrs. Wesley would have applied for a divorce from me if I had not served a year in the army at the beginning of the war.

I began bitterly to regret that I had been obliged to present my cousin to her so abruptly.  I wished it had occurred to me to give him a word or two of caution, or that I had had sense enough to adhere to my first plan of letting him feed himself at the little oyster establishment round the corner.  But wishes and regrets could not now mend the matter; so I hailed an approaching horse-car, and comforted myself on the rear platform with the reflection that perhaps the colonel would not wave the palmetto leaf too vigorously, if he waved it at all, in the face of Mrs. Wesley.

II

The awkwardness of the situation disturbed me more or less during the forenoon; but fortunately it was a half-holiday, and I was able to leave the office shortly after one o’clock.

I do not know how I came to work myself into such a state of mind on the way up town, but as I stepped from the horse-car and turned into Clinton Place I had a strong apprehension that I should find some unpleasant change in the facial aspect of the little red brick building I occupied--a scowl, for instance, on the brown-stone eyebrow over the front door.  I actually had a feeling of relief when I saw that the facade presented its usual unaggressive appearance.

As I entered the hall, Mrs. Wesley, who had heard my pass-key grating in the lock, was coming down-stairs.

“Is my cousin here, Clara?” I asked, in the act of reaching up to hang my hat on the rack.