The stranger regarded her as if struck by the note of challenge in her tone. His serious eyes seemed to her to be endeavoring to probe her own in search of the cause of her sharpness. "I can do no more," was his answer, "than to tell him what I have always told him--the truth, as far as I can see it." "And the truth which you can tell him here--here, before the sacred relics of our dead, the sacred memorials of our Lost Cause--" She could not go on, but stopped suddenly that he might not hear her voice break. "He has never been taught anything but that the men of the South fought for what they believed, and that no man can do a nobler thing than to give his life for his faith." She became suddenly and illogically sure that she was talking to her son-in-law, although the ground of her conviction was no other than the one she had just before rejected. The whole thing flashed upon her mind as perfectly simple. Her daughter knew that on this day she was always to be found here, and had meant to meet her, with the little son bearing his grandfather's name. The question now was whether the husband knew. Something in his air, something half-propitiatory, something certainly beyond the ordinary deference offered to a lady who is a stranger, gave her a vague distrust. She was not untouched by the desire for reconciliation, but she had again and again resisted that before, and least of all could she tolerate the idea of being tricked. The possibility that her son-in-law might be feigning ignorance to work the more surely upon her sympathy angered her. "Do you know who I am?" she demanded abruptly. "I beg your pardon," he answered, evidently surprised, "but I have never been in Richmond before. If you are well known here, or are the wife of some man famous in the South, I am too completely a stranger to recognize you." "Yet you seemed to wish to explain yourself to me. Why?" "I don't know," he began hesitatingly, searching her face with his straightforward gray eyes. Then he flushed slightly, and broke out with new feeling: "Yes; I do know. You came just as I was going away because I could not endure the sadness of it; when every one of these cases seemed to me to drip with blood and tears. That sounds to you extravagant, but the whole thing came over me so tremendously that I could n't bear it." "I do not understand," she returned tremulously. "You have such collections at the North, I suppose." "But here it came over me that to all the sorrow of loss was added the bitterness of defeat. I felt that no Southerner could come here without feeling that all the agony this commemorates had been in vain; and the pity of it took me by the throat so that when I spoke to you, you were a sort of impersonation of the South--of the Southern women; and I wanted to ask for pardon." She drew a deep breath and raised her head proudly.