Another young sailor--the handsomest of them all, whom everybody in my father’s house loved--was Captain Warren. How well I remember that evening when the order came bidding him report at once to his ship, which was to set forth on a long cruise in Eastern waters! Shall I ever forget the look in his eyes as he turned them upon Milicent! How beautiful she was that night! How gracious and sweet, how greatly to be desired! And how many desired her! Milicent had been married several years and I was in the raptures of my first winter in society when my father died, and mother decided that we should leave Norfolk--Norfolk where river and bay and ocean had sung our cradle-songs--and go to Petersburg to live. In this day of independent women it sounds absurd to say that it was scarcely considered wise or delicate for women to live without the protection of a male relative in the house, and to add that as far as possible they were shielded from the burden of business responsibilities. Uncle Henry considered it imperative that we should be under his care; he could not come to Norfolk, so we went to him. We could scarcely have been strangers anywhere in Virginia, and in Petersburg we had many friends. The Lees and the Randolphs, the Pegrams and the Pages, the Stringfellows, the Hamiltons, the Witherspoons, the Bannisters, the Donnans, the Dunlops, and a score of others made it easy to exercise the genius for friendship which in Virginia hands down that relation from generation to generation. It was in Petersburg that my trousseau was made. Much of it was the work and embroidery of loving, light-hearted girls whose feet were set to music and dancing, and most of it was worn by women who trod instead fields red with the blood of their friends and kinsmen. During the long, dreary years in which the Northern ports were closed, and the South clothed itself as best it could, or went in rags, that trousseau constituted my sole outfit, and it reinforced the wardrobes of some comrades in war and want. CHAPTER II HOW I MET DAN GREY “Have you met Dan Grey?” Charlie Murray and I were galloping along a country road. “I haven’t, Charlie. I met his brother Dick in Norfolk, and didn’t like him at all.” “Well, Nell, you’d like Dan--everybody does. I wonder you haven’t met him. Dan never fails to meet every pretty girl that comes here.” I had heard that before. Indeed, I had heard a great deal about Dan Grey that made me long to get even with him. Everybody had a way of speaking as if Petersburg wasn’t Petersburg with Dan Grey left out. “You ought to meet Dan Grey,” Charlie repeated. “I don’t think so,” I rapped out. “I think I can get along very nicely without meeting Dan Grey”--Dan Grey seemed to be getting along very nicely without meeting me--“I know as many nice men now as I have time to see.”