An expression of agitation and cunning passed over Mrs. Basil's face. "Colonel Reybold," she whined, "I pity your blasted hopes. If I was a widow, they should be comfoted. Alas! my daughter is in love with one of the Fitz-chews of Fawqueeah. His parents is cousins of the Jedge, and attached to the military." The Congressman looked disappointed, but not yet satisfied. "Give me at once the address of your husband," he spoke. "If you do not, I shall ask your daughter for it, and she can not refuse me." The mistress of the boarding-house was not without alarm, but she dispelled it with an outbreak of anger. "If my daughter disobeys her mother," she cried, "and betrays the Jedge's incog., she is no Basil, Colonel Reybold. The Basils repudiate her, and she may jine the Dutch and other foreigners at her pleasure." "That is her only safety," exclaimed Reybold. "I hope to break every string that holds her to yonder barren honor and exhausted soil." He pointed toward Virginia, and hastened away to the Capitol. All the way up the squalid and muddy avenue of that day he mused and wondered: "Who is Fitzhugh? Is there such a person any more than a Judge Basil? And yet there _is_ a Judge, for Joyce has told me so. _She_, at least, can not lie to me. At last," he thought, "the dream of my happiness is over. Invincible in her prejudice as all these Virginians, Joyce Basil has made her bed among the starveling First Families, and there she means to live and die. Five years hence she will have her brood around her. In ten years she will keep a boarding-house and borrow money. As her daughters grow up to the stature and grace of their mother, they will be proud and poor again and breed in and out, until the race will perish from the earth." Slow to love, deeply interested, baffled but unsatisfied, Reybold made up his mind to cut his perplexity short by leaving the city for the county of Fauquier. As he passed down the avenue late that afternoon, he turned into E Street, near the theatre, to engage a carriage for his expedition. It was a street of livery stables, gambling dens, drinking houses, and worse; murders had been committed along its sidewalks. The more pretentious _canaille_ of the city harbored there to prey on the hotels close at hand and aspire to the chance acquaintance of gentlemen. As Reybold stood in an archway of this street, just as the evening shadows deepened above the line of sunset, he saw something pass which made his heart start to his throat and fastened him to the spot. Veiled and walking fast, as if escaping detection or pursuit, the figure of Joyce Basil flitted over the pavement and disappeared in a door about at the middle of this Alsatian quarter of the capital. "What house is that?" he asked of a constable passing by, pointing to the door she entered. "Gambling den," answered the officer. "It used to be old Phil Pendleton's."