So Dr. Cary felt that soft spring morning as he stood on the front porch of the roomy and rambling old mansion, where the Carys had had their seat and had made the Birdwood hospitality celebrated for more than two hundred years, and looked across the wide lawn, once well trimmed and filled with shrubbery and flowers, now ragged and torn. His eye took in the whole scene. The wide fields, once teeming with life, stretched before him now empty and silent; the fences were broken down or had disappeared altogether. And yet the grass was fresh and green, the trees and bushes were just bursting from bud to leaf; the far-off mountains rose blue and tender across the newly washed sky; the birds were flitting and singing joyously, and somewhere, around the house, a young girl’s voice was singing sweeter than any of the birds. The look on the old soldier’s face was for a moment one of deep gravity, if not of dejection; but it passed away the next instant, as Blair’s song reached him and as a step sounded behind him, and a hand was laid lightly on his shoulder, followed by an even softer touch on his arm, as his wife’s face rested for a moment against it. At the caressing touch his expression changed, he looked down in her eyes and, when he spoke, it was with a new light in his own eyes and a new tone in his voice. “Well, Bess, we’ll begin all over again. We have each other, and we have Blair, and we have—the land. It is as much as our forefathers began with. At least, I think we have the land—I don’t suppose they’ll take that away. If they do—why, we have each other and Blair, anyhow. If we only had the boy!” He turned his face away. “He died for his country,” said the mother, though her voice belied the courage of her words. “He died like a soldier: with all his wounds before.” He looked down into his wife’s eyes. “Yes.” And she sighed deeply. “We have to take care of what’s left. Where is Jim Sherwood? I have not seen him.” “He has gone.” “What!” The Doctor gave a whistle of amazement. “I’d almost as soon have expected Mammy Krenda and Tarquin to leave.” Jim was one of the most trusted men about the place, a sort of preacher and leader, and had married, as his third wife, Mammy Krenda’s daughter, Jane.