While Betty was saying this, she was standing, delicately poised, on a table, putting a wreath of laurel leaves around the portrait of Colonel Beverley, taken in his youth, when he was a boy officer, with his first epaulets, his hand sternly grasping his sword. Above the portrait hung the same sword, and Betty was wont to decorate the hilt with a sprig of laurel, too. The portrait was a handsome picture, and the Colonel was secretly proud of it. A part of Betty's outrageous flattery of Colonel Beverley was that to assure the Colonel, solemnly, that nothing would induce her to marry until she could find a man as handsome as he was in his youth. The Colonel, sitting in his great chair, listened to this for the hundredth time with the greatest pleasure. Since that St. Martin's summer of his youth, there had been a long period of tranquil life at Rosehill. Then had come the great tragedy of the wartime, and Colonel Beverley had put on a gray uniform, and ridden at the head of the regiment the county raised, his stalwart son, Betty's father, riding by his bridle. The Colonel came back in four years to Rosehill, but the young son lay buried on the Bed of Honor, with a bullet through his brave young heart. Betty was a dark-eyed baby girl in those days. Now, she was a dark-eyed girl of twenty, and was all the Colonel had left in this world. Even Rosehill went with the rest. The back of Colonel Beverley's chair was against the window which looked toward Rosehill, for the Colonel was sixty-eight, and could not forget wholly the sixty-seven years when Rosehill had been his home, and did not like to look toward the place. To make it worse, Rosehill had been bought by some rich Northern people, who had wickedly and sacrilegiously, as the Colonel considered, put a furnace in the house, electric lights and many other modern and devilish inventions, which harrowed the Colonel's soul. So, like a wise man, he turned his eyes away. Within the plain little room were some relics that had survived the universal wreck. There was Betty's harp, to which she sang the old-fashioned ballads the Colonel loved. Then, there was the Beverley punch-bowl--a great bowl of old Lowestoft porcelain, with three medallions, representing hunting scenes, and an inscription in faded gilt, "For John Beverley, Esq., of Virginia." It had belonged to many John Beverleys, Esquires, before it came to the Colonel, and was regarded as a sort of fetich in the family. Betty alone had the responsibility of dusting it, and Uncle Cesar would say solemnly: "I'd heap ruther break my arm than break that thur bowl."