doing, and then I was on tenter-hooks.  His point of view was so opposed to ours as to threaten in several instances to bring on an engagement all along the line.  This calamity was averted by my passing something to him at the critical moment.  Now I checked his advance by a slice of cold tongue, and now I turned his flank with another cup of tea; but I questioned my ability to preserve peace throughout the evening.  Before the meal was at an end there had crept into Clara’s manner a polite calmness which I never liked to see.  What was I going to do with these two after supper, when my cousin Flagg, with his mind undistracted by relays of cream toast, could give his entire attention to the Lost Cause?

As we were pushing the chairs back from the table, I was inspired with the idea of taking our guest off to a cafe concert over in the Bowery—­a volksgarten very popular in those days.  While my whispered suggestion was meeting Clara’s cordial approval, our friend Bleeker dropped in.  So the colonel and Bleeker and I passed the evening with “lager-beer and Meyer-beer,” as my lively kinsman put it; after which he spent the night on the sofa in our sitting-room, for we had no spare chamber to place at his disposal.

“I shall be very snug here,” he said, smiling down my apologies.  “I’m a ’possum for adapting myself to any odd hollow.”

The next morning my cousin was early astir, possibly not having found that narrow springless lounge all a ’possum could wish, and joined us in discussing a plan which I had proposed overnight to Mrs. Wesley, namely, that he should hire an apartment in a quiet street near by, and take his meals—­that was to say, his dinner—­with us, until he could make such arrangements as would allow him to live more conveniently.  To return South, where all the lines of his previous business connections were presumably broken, was at present out of the question.

“The war has ruined our people,” said the colonel.  “I will have to put up for a while with a place in a bank or an insurance office, or something in that small way.  The world owes me a living, North or South.”

His remark nettled me a little, though he was, of course, unaware of my relations with the Savonarola Fire Insurance Company, and had meant no slight.

“I don’t quite see that,” I observed.

“Don’t see what?”

“How the world contrived to get so deeply into your debt—­how all the points of the compass managed it.”

“Thomas, I didn’t ask to be born, did I?”

“Probably not.”

“But I was born, wasn’t I?”

“To all appearances.”

“Well, then!”

“But you cannot hold the world in general responsible for your birth.  The responsibility narrows itself down to your parents.”

“Then I am euchred.  By one of those laws of nature which make this globe a sweet spot to live on, they were taken from me just when I needed them most—­my mother in my infancy, and my father in my childhood.”