For political rancor time is not an emollient panacea. Sectional hatred bites hard on memory, as acid into copper, and the perspective of years of absence failed to alter in any degree the rough angles, ugly scars, and deep shadows that characterized the people's portrait of Judge Kent. Impotence to correct intensifies public sense of wrong, and compulsory submission to injury borne silently garners bitterness which in actual strife would effervesce. Only those who lived in the Southern seaboard and Gulf States during the long, stinging years that followed the surrender at Appomattox can understand why the names of Grant and Sherman stirred little enmity, when compared with the unfathomable execration and contempt aroused by the civil Federal vultures that settled like a cloud over State, county, and municipal treasuries. The battening of this horde soon reduced Southern finances and credit to a grewsome skeleton. In that stifling Ragnarok, family estates feudal in extent were seized as "abandoned lands" and parcelled out to freedman, who had been enticed to abandon them in order to succeed their masters in ownership. "Patriots are paupers now," was the grim proverb current among Confederates, and the very few who showed conditions bordering on comfort were, in public estimation, required to "stand and deliver" an explanation of the fortuitous circumstances that saved them from the general ruin. Judge Kent's judicial career had been disastrous to the interests of many throughout the State, and among the legions who improved their fortunes by coming south to "reconstruct and to dispense justice," he was especially detested by the citizens of Y----. To Eglah, his insistence upon returning to Nutwood was explicable solely on the hypothesis that speculative reverses had demanded the sale of his own property and swallowed the result; hence his resources were exhausted. Recollection of slights, insinuations, invectives, and jeers that had imbittered her childhood did not lend beckoning glamour to the home-coming; and without the powerful protection of Mrs. Maurice's presence she suspected she was making a social plunge with no net spread to succor. Deliberately and systematically she planned the gradual renovation and, to a limited degree, the refurnishing of the beautiful old house where it now seemed her future must be spent. A new close carriage and stylish trap were shipped in advance, and Mrs. Mitchell went down to superintend preparations for occupancy of Nutwood, leaving Judge Kent and his daughter to follow a week later. Old Aaron was stooping badly and stiff with rheumatism, but refused to relax his grasp on the butler's reins; Celie maintained her iron sway in the kitchen; her two daughters were eager to discharge the duties of housemaids, and Oliver, hopelessly bed-ridden, claimed that his son had the best right to succeed him as coachman.