Baynell, commenting on the splendor of the tulips as he smoked his cigar, spoke of the craze for speculation in the bulb that had existed in Holland, and said he had once seen an old book of illustrations of famous prize-takers, with fabulous prices; he had always wondered how they compared with the results of modern culture and the infinite variety to which the bloom had been brought, and he had often wished to see the book again. "Why, we have that!" exclaimed Mrs. Gwynn, pausing with her hands full of the gold variety "flamed" with scarlet. She glanced uncertainly toward the bookshelves, then suddenly remembering--"Oh, I know now where it is;--in the old bookcase upstairs, at the head of the third flight. I will call one of the ladies to go for it." Baynell rose, his lighted cigar between his lips. "Don't trouble them; let me go!" Julius heard the swift step of a young man on the stair. He knew that the crucial moment had come. And yet for the sake of the safety of his father, who had concealed him here, he dared not defend himself with his pistols. He had not a moment for flight or to seek a hiding-place. He could only nerve his powers to meet the crisis as best he might. Baynell, taken wholly by surprise, felt his senses reel when, like the grotesque inconsequence of a dream, a man in the uniform of a Confederate officer in the quiet, peaceful house confronted him at the head of the flight. "You are my prisoner!" Baynell mechanically gasped, clutching Julius with one hand and drawing his pistol with the other. "You are my prisoner!" "In a horn!" retorted Julius, delivering his enemy a blow between the eyes which flung Baynell, stunned and bleeding, down the flight to the landing, while the boy went by him like a flash. That swift fiery figure, with its gray regimentals and its brass and steel glitter, covered with blood, passed Leonora like some gory apparition as she stood in the library door, amazed, pallid, breathless, summoned by the sound of loud voices and the reverberating clamors of the collision on the stairs. Julius dashed through the drawing-rooms, opened the window on the western balcony, sprang over the rail, and disappeared swiftly among the low boughs of the row of evergreen shrubs planted there in old times as a wind-break, and stretching along the crest of the hill.