Ten minutes later he said good-bye to her and sallied forth into the night. She stood in the window and watched the huge sentinel stride off behind him like a gaunt shadow which could not be shaken off. That figure and another like it were to cling to his heels until he came to his journey's end. She smiled and shook her head pityingly as Harry Green passed out of her life at the corner below. In her own room shortly afterward she took an old photograph from a drawer, looked at it a moment with a smile on her lips, and then tore it into many pieces. "The strangest part of it is that I don't seem to mind," she said to herself, and that night she slept peacefully. THE GLOAMING GHOSTS PART I Gloaming had been the home of the Gloames for two centuries at least. Late in the seventeenth century one of the forebears acquired the picturesque acres in Virginia and they have not been without a Gloame as master since that time. At the time when the incidents to be related in this story transpired, Colonel Cassady Gloame was the owner of the famous old estate and he was lord of the countryside. The power of the ancient Gloames was not confined to the rural parts of that vast district in southern Virginia; it was dominant in the county seats for miles around. But that is neither here nor there. The reader knows the traditional influence of every old Virginia family. It is like the royal household of an eastern monarchy. It leads, dominates, and sets the pace for all its little universe. No one cares to learn that the Gloames were the first family of them all; it does not matter especially that old Sir Henry settled there nearly a hundred years before the Revolution; it is simple history that some of the Gloames who followed after him fought like tigers for the country in one war and just as hard against it in another. Let it be understood that Gloaming was two centuries old and that there was no fairer, prouder name in all Virginia than that which had been handed down to Colonel Cassady Gloame, the last of the race.