In this old part of the house reigned comfort, quiet, and shabbiness, sometimes an excellent combination. This was the one room forever sacred to men, boys, dogs, books, and Angela Vaughn. There, with the door shut, all was silent, still, and serene--the serenity of books and bachelorhood. Lyddon drew up a great worn leather chair to the fire, which glowed ruddily and steadily, and, placing his feet on the fender, reflected upon the stupendous changes which he knew were at hand, and which the whole community seemed to comprehend as little as did the Harrowby family. War and revolution and evolution were imminent, the upsetting of the whole economic and social order, the leap in the dark which Lyddon felt sure meant the fall into an abyss; yet the people talked about it lightly and sentimentally, and seemed to think it would be a mere holiday parade. But if it should be otherwise, Lyddon knew enough of the character and temper of the people around him to understand that they were by nature the most furious and indomitable of fighters; that the women, if softer, were, if anything, fiercer than the men. His thoughts then turned to Angela Vaughn. He often, in his own mind, compared himself to a gardener who has taken a ragged seedling and has nurtured it until, grown tall and fair, it is ready to burst into all the glory of its blooming and then be gathered by other hands than those which trained and watered it and gave it the fresh air and the blessed sun. He remembered her when he had first come to Harrowby to prepare Neville Tremaine for West Point, and Richard for the University of Virginia. Angela was then a nine-year-old, in pinafores, and had reminded Lyddon of a Skye terrier, being all eyes and hair. She was as light as a feather, and Lyddon, accustomed to the heavier proportions of English children, thought that this wisp of a child, with her tangle of chestnut hair hanging down her back, and her laughing, black-lashed eyes of no color and all colors, must be indeed a delicate blossom; but she led the life of the most robust boy, and had never known a day’s illness in all those ten years. Lyddon recalled her, pattering about in the snow, her red hood and mantle making her look like a redbird. He could see her swinging on the branches of the cherry trees in the orchard in the springtime, her laughing face and her little white ruffled sunbonnet making her look like a cherry blossom herself. He had often watched her scrambling, with the agility of a boy rather than a girl, on and off her pony, or merrily dancing the schottische with Archie in the big hall, their music being their own childish singing; or dashing down the garden path to a little nook on a wooden bench under the lilac trees, at the end, and always full of a strange activity. But tucked away under her arm or in her pocket was pretty sure to be found a book from her own special library, which consisted of four volumes--a book of good old fairy tales, “The Arabian Nights,”