Still I was not ill-pleased with the result of our interview. She had stepped down from her pedestal. She had left for a while the tragic plane on which she had hitherto moved and from which she had stooped to me. I had climbed a step nearer to her. In future she would not find it so easy to keep me at the distance that suited her pleasure and that at the same time whetted my curiosity. And perhaps something more than my curiosity. For I could not deny that, handsome and perplexing, cold, yet capable of ardor, she had taken a strong grip upon my thoughts. I could not keep her out of my mind for an hour together. A dozen times a day I caught myself looking for her, listening for the sound of her voice, watching for her appearance. The morning was long, the hour dragged that brought neither the one nor the other. Nay, there were times—I was idle, be it remembered, and crippled—when the desire to bridge the distance between us and to set myself right with her became a passion; when I would have given very much for a smile from the averted face, or a look from the eyes that passed coldly by me. It was absurd, but I have said I was idle. And yet after all was it so absurd? I compared her with the women whom I had known at home; with the women of fashion with their red and white cheeks, their preposterous headdresses, their insipid talk of routs and the card table; or again with our country-bred hoydens, honest and noisy, with scarce an idea beyond the stillroom or the annual race meeting: and I found that she rivaled the former in dignity and the latter in simplicity. Adorable, inexorable creature, she was well named Constantia! I was glad—such a hold was she getting on my mind—when her father returned, two days later than he had said, and brought news that distracted my thoughts. The check at King’s Mountain had stopped Lord Cornwallis in his advance on North Carolina. He had fallen back and established himself again at Winnsboro’, so that he was still not more than sixty or seventy miles from us. “If your bone were set, I should send you north, Major,” Wilmer said with a look more than commonly thoughtful. “But I fancy that your friend, Tarleton, has learned his lesson from Ferguson, and won’t stray far from Headquarters. And now Greene has taken over Gates’s command—” “Is that so?” “It is—he won’t leave your people so much time to look about them. I do not think that they will journey as far as this, but if I thought they would, you would have to travel, my friend, fare as you might.”