"I shall be down right after stables; mother will come sooner," was all he said. Then he condescended to notice the rest of us. Right after stables indeed! Could you not even resent _that_, Kitty Carrington? Were you already so abject that a newly-won lover dare tell you that after his horses were seen to he would look after you? Are you already falling into the cavalry groove? learning that unwritten creed that puts the care of his mount as the corner-stone of a trooper's temple? In a state of daze I drove homeward with the ladies. Nobody talked much. Everybody was happy except my perturbed self. Pauline and Kitty sat hand in hand. We reached the lodgings, and were but a few moments in the parlor when Vinton appeared at the door ushering Mrs. Amory. Kitty was at the window arranging some flowers, but turned instantly, and, blushing like one of her own rosebuds, walked rapidly across the room, looking shyly up into the elder lady's face. How could I help seeing the moistened eye, the slightly quivering lip, when Mrs. Amory bent and, with one softly-spoken word, "dear," kissed the bonny face. We masculines took ourselves off for a while. It was plain the women had much to talk about, and when they have, the sooner husbands, brothers, and lovers leave, the better for all concerned. "Mr. Brandon," said the major, as we settled ourselves on the back veranda, "it looks as though your prognostication had come true. Our Sandbrook Ku-Klux affair has brought its romance with it." "Two of them, major! Two of them! We might call them, in view of your modest estimate of army attractions, 'Miss Summers' Sacrifice' and, and----" "Kitty's Conquest," said Harrod. * * * * * Swiftly through a tawny waste of whirling waters a great steamer ploughs its way. From towering smoke-stacks volumes of smoke stream back along the tumbling wake and settle on the low-lying shores. Breasting the torrent, we have rushed past crowded levee, past sloop, and ship, and shallop, past steamers of every class and build, ocean cruisers, river monarchs, bayou traders, swamp prowlers. Lordly up-stream packets lead or follow; churches, domes, chimneys, cotton-presses, elevators, warehouses, give way to low, one-storied, whitewashed cottages, or deep-veranda'd frame homesteads on the one side, to flat and open plantations on the other. Eastward there is naught to span the horizon but one far-reaching level of swamp or trembling prairie. Westward, two miles back from the river-bank, bold barriers of forest, dense, dark, and impenetrable, shut off the view. In front lies the eddying, swirling, boiling bosom of the Mississippi,--the winding highway to the North,--sweeping in majestic curve through shores of shining green. Behind us, nestling along the grand arcs of its doubling bend, New Orleans and Algiers, close clinging to the mighty stream that at once threatens and cajoles. The river is master here, yet dreams not of his power.