The three men, left together with cigars and whisky and a good fire, settled themselves for a symposium such as they had enjoyed a thousand times before. As Lyddon looked at the two young men before him, a sense of impending disaster suddenly overwhelmed him. The thought of a break in this family, so passionately attached to each other, so much in sympathy, was poignant to him. Strangely enough he felt and saw that in this case the tie of brotherhood would stand a greater strain than that even of fatherhood or motherhood. Richard Tremaine had a largeness of mind which was totally unknown to Colonel Tremaine, and Mrs. Tremaine never pretended to think; she only felt. The talk inevitably drifted toward the state of public affairs. Richard Tremaine was the only man in the whole county so far as Lyddon knew who had any just appreciation of the magnitude of the coming conflict. Richard coolly reckoned upon the war lasting until one side or the other was exhausted--the North in money, the South in men. Neville naturally looked at it with the eye of a military man. There all was chaos. Neville was too good a student of military history to underrate the strength of five million homogeneous people fighting upon their own ground. He had observed that the North had the same undervaluation of the fighting strength of the South which the South unquestionably had of the North. He spoke of this. “Those dangerous delusions,” he said, “will soon pass away on both sides, then will come a struggle the like of which has not often been seen. If the United States had a trained army of two or three hundred thousand men to start with, the result could be better predicated. As it is, great multitudes of men on both sides will have to be trained to be soldiers and the real fighting won’t begin until that is done.” This was controverted by Richard, who believed that the Southern armies would need far less training than the Northern, and that the first successes of the South would be so brilliant as to stagger the North and incline it for peace. Lyddon listened, occasionally interjecting a word. The discussion, earnest but not bitter, lasted until near midnight, when Richard, rising, said to Neville: “Come along, old boy, you must have some sleep before starting.” The two went off, their arms around each other’s necks as Lyddon had often seen them in their boyhood, and passed into their little low-ceiled rooms next the study. As Lyddon followed them to his own room, he heard Neville rousing Peter, who lay asleep on the hearth rug before Richard’s fire. One of the continuing marvels to Lyddon was this universal practice of the negroes making the fire at night in the bedrooms and then lying down and going to sleep on the hearth rug. None of them so far as Lyddon knew had yet been burnt up, but why any of them had escaped, he never could understand.