The fact of the house having windows, and the windows being set with glass, marks it as one of the "aristocratic" houses, though the man who built it, only two years ago, had come empty-handed and broken in heart and spirit from scenes of desolation and wretchedness in the Southern States. If ever a man buried hope, ambition, and life-energy with the Lost Cause, that man was Oray Granville. Even before the rebellion broke out, he had lost his all through the North (as he reasoned); for all that life seemed worth living for, was the woman he had loved. A wealthy Northern man had led to the altar the queenly form which to him had been an embodiment of all that is graceful and divine. The form, life, and soul seemed to have fled from the eyes into which he had gazed just once after the binding words had been spoken. When the war broke out, he was among the first in the field; and, though fighting for what he deemed his rights, he asked, at the end of each bloody affray--as did St. Arnaud at the Crimea--"And is there no bullet for me?" And after each such day did the look he had caught from those sad, black orbs settle down deeper into the shadows of his own gray eyes. Returning to the home of his youth once more, before starting out on his dangerous journey over the plains to Arizona--where he was to join an older brother--he found domiciled at his father's house his cousin, a young girl of eighteen. In Miss Jenny's eyes, the vague rumor that Cousin Ray had been "crossed in love" lent an additional charm to his handsome presence, and the melancholy, half-reserved air that made him almost unapproachable. Though there was apparently little in common between the world-weary, disappointed man and the little elfish creature that looked so joyfully out upon the world with her light-blue eyes, he unconsciously fell under the influence of her restless, but most cheerful spirit. Not that her temper was always sunny and even--far from it: but too often her eyes would flash fire, and the quivering flanks of the fine-chiselled nose distend and almost flatten in the hot, flushed face. Just so her Cousin Ray's nostrils were wont to spread when angered or excited--only that his face would grow white and more marble-like than usual.