"Not for the war," he said quickly, with a gesture which seemed to wave aside her pride and showed her how well he had understood her triumph at the admission seemingly implied in his words. "I am a Northern man, and I believe with my whole soul that the North was right. I believe in the cause for which my father died. Only I see now that if he had lived in the South, the same spirit would have carried him into the Confederate army." "But for what should you ask pardon, if the North was in the right?" "For myself; for not understanding--for being so dull all these years that I have lived with a wife faithful in her heart to the South and too loyal to me to speak. We in the North have forgiven, and we think that the South should forget. It has come over me to-day how easy it is for the conquerors to forgive and how hard that must be for the conquered." "You do not understand even now," she said, her voice low with feeling. "Because we are conquered we can forgive; but we should be less than human to forget." The room was very still for a little, and then, following out her thought, she said as if in wonder: "And you, a Northerner, have felt all this!" He shook his head, with a little smile. "It is perhaps too much to ask," returned he, "that you Southern women should realize that even a Northerner is still human." "Yes, yes; but to feel our suffering, to see--" "It has always been facing me, I understand now, in my wife's eyes--the immeasurable pathos of a people beaten in a struggle they felt to be right; but she had been so happy otherwise, and she never spoke of it." "In the heart of every Southern woman," she said solemnly, though now without bitterness, "is always the anguish of our Lost Cause. We cover the surface, we accept, and God knows we have been patient; but each of us has deep down a sense of the blood that was poured out in vain, of the agony of the men we loved, of how they were humiliated--humiliated, and of the great cause of liberty lost--lost!" For long, bitter years she had not spoken even to her nearest friends as she was talking to this stranger, this Northerner. The consciousness of this brought her back to the remembrance that he was the husband of her daughter. "Has your wife no relatives in the South who might have made you understand how we Southern women must feel?" she asked. He grew instantly colder. "I have never seen her Southern relatives." "Pardon the curiosity of an old woman," she went on, watching him keenly; "may I ask why?" "My wife's mother did not choose to know the Yankee her daughter married." "And you?" "I did not choose to force an acquaintance or to be known on sufferance," he answered crisply. "I was aware of no wrong, and I did not choose to ask to be forgiven for being a Northerner." She knew that in her heart she was already accepting this strong, fine man, alien as he was to all the traditions of her life, and she was not ill pleased at his pride.