What a night--riding away from his father’s house in the darkness, leaving his mother behind, leaving all tradition behind, condemning himself to be an outlaw in the hearts of those he had always loved--for the sake of duty! One can imagine Aldrich blinking a little and rubbing his hands together. “Teddy is laying it on rather thick,” he no doubt says to himself; but he must nevertheless have been filled with admiration. However, let us, who are together revisiting the scene of my father’s triumph on that evening in the farmhouse long ago, be not too much in fear for the heart of the woman Tilly. At any rate her physical self, if not her heart, was safe. Although there can be little doubt that the presence of the virgin Tilly, sitting in the half darkness, and the kindliness of the shadows that had temporarily enhanced her failing beauty, may have had a good deal to do with father’s talent on that evening, I am sure nothing else ever came of it. Father, in his own way, was devoted to mother. And he had his own way of treasuring her. Did he not treasure always the lovelier moments of her? He had found her in a farmhouse when he was by way of being something of a young swell himself and she was a bound girl; and she was then beautiful--beautiful without the aid of shadows cast by a kerosene lamp. In reality she was the aristocrat of the two, as the beautiful one is always the aristocrat; and oh, how little beauty in woman is understood! The popular magazine covers and the moving-picture actresses have raised the very devil with our American conception of womanly beauty. But father had delicacy, of a sort, of that you may be quite sure; and do you not suppose that Tilly, in the Ohio farmhouse, sensed something of his attitude toward what fragment of beauty was left in her, and that she loved him for that attitude--as I am sure my own mother also did? My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms, into the arms of the others, over the top of the wall. And now the weary prisoners with their escort have come down off the hillside to a valley and are approaching a large old southern mansion, standing back from the road they have been traveling, and the officers in charge of the prisoners--there were two of them--command the guards to turn in at a gate that leads to the house. There is an open space before the house where the prisoners are gathered and the ground--covered with firm turf during most of the year--has, under the continuous rains, become soft and yielding. Where each prisoner stands a puddle gathers about his feet. The house is dark, but for a single light at the back, and one of the officers begins shouting. A large pack of hunting dogs have come from a shed, hidden away in the darkness somewhere, and are gathered growling and barking in a half circle about the prisoners.