HE wide avenue which ran north and south and cut the town of Darley into halves held the best and oldest residences. One side of the street caught the full rays of the morning sun and the other the slanting red beams of the afternoon. For so small a town, it was a well-graded and well-kept thoroughfare. Strips of grass lay like ribbons between the sidewalks and the roadway, and at the triangular spaces created by the intersection of certain streets there were rusty iron fences built primarily to protect diminutive fountains which had long since ceased to play. In one of these little parks, in the heart of the town, as it was in the hearts of the inhabitants, stood a monument erected to “The Confederate Dead,” a well-modelled, life-size figure of a Southern private wrought in stone in faraway Italy. Had it been correctly placed on its pedestal?--that was the question anxiously asked by reverent passers-by, for the cloaked and knapsacked figure, which time was turning gray, stood with its back to the enemy's country. “Yes, it is right,” some would say, “for the soldier is represented as being on night picket-duty in Northern territory, and his thoughts and eyes are with his dear ones at home and the country he is defending.” Henry Dwight, the wealthy sire of the aggressive young man with whom the foregoing chapters have principally dealt, lived in one of the moss and ivy grown houses on the eastern side of the avenue. It was a red brick structure two and a half stories high, with a colonial veranda, and had a square, white-windowed cupola as the apex of the slanting roof. There was a semicircular drive, which entered the grounds at one corner in the front and swept gracefully past the door. The central and smaller front gate, for the use of pedestrians, with its imitation stone posts, spanned by a white crescent, was reached from the house by a gravelled walk bordered by boxwood. On the right and left were rustic summerhouses, grape arbors and parterres containing roses and other flowers, all of which were well cared for by an old colored gardener. Henry Dwight was a grain and cotton merchant, money-lender, and the president and chief stockholder of the Darley Cotton Mills, whose great brick buildings and cottages for employés stood a mile or so to the west of the town. This morning, having written his daily letters, he was strolling in his grounds smoking a cigar. To any one who knew him well it would have been plain that his mind was disturbed. Adjoining the Dwight homestead there was another ancestral house equally as spacious and stand-. ing in quite as extensive, if more neglected, grounds. It was here that Major Warren lived, and it happened that he, too, was on his lawn just beyond the ramshackle intervening fence, the gate of which had fallen from its hinges and been taken away.