oratory into speech-making--a thing the House will not tolerate from a young member. He had naturally a beautiful and penetrating voice and much grace and dignity in speaking. These were enough without risking making himself ridiculous by a premature display as an orator. He sometimes thrilled when the great battles were being fought before his eyes--it was in the reconstruction time--and longed for the day which he felt would come when he might go down among the captains and the shouting, but he had the genius of waiting. Then he was a pleasant man at dinner--and his four years army service had given him a soldierly frankness and directness. He lived with Miles in a simple and quiet way in Washington. He did not go out much, as indeed he had no time. He became quite cynical to himself about women. The pretty girls from New York were quite captivated with the young man from Virginia. They wanted to know all about his lovely old place, especially one charming bud, Miss de Peyster. “Come and see it,” Pembroke would answer good-naturedly. “Half the house was burned up by our friends, the enemy--the other half is habitable.” “And haven’t you miles and miles of fields and forests, like an English nobleman?” the gay creature asked. “Oh yes. Miles and miles. The taxes eat up the crops, and the crops eat up the land.” “How nice,” cried the daughter of the Knickerbockers. “How much more romantic it is to have a broken down old family mansion and thousands of acres of land, than to be a stockbroker or a real estate man--and then to have gone through the whole war--and to have been promoted on the field--” Pembroke smiled rather dolefully. His ruined home, his mortgaged acres, Miles’ life-long trouble, his four years of marching and starving and fighting, did not appear like romantic incidents in life, but as cruel blows of fate to him. But Helena de Peyster was a pleasant girl, and her mother was gentle, amiable, and well-bred. They had one of the gayest and most charming houses in Washington, and entertained half the diplomatic corps at dinner during every week. They would gladly have had Pembroke oftener. He came in to quiet dinners with them, assumed a fatherly air with Helena, and liked them cordially. They were good to Miles too, who sometimes went to them timidly on rainy afternoons when he would not be likely to find anybody else. So went the world with Pembroke for some years until one evening, going to his modest lodgings, he found a letter with Colonel Berkeley’s big red seal on it awaiting him. He and Miles dined--then Pembroke, over the wine, opened the Colonel’s billet. It was brief.