Next morning in the ghostly dawning hour, Neville Tremaine left his father’s roof. His farewell to his mother and her last blessing had been given him in her bedroom. Angela met him on the landing of the stair and gave him a shy parting kiss. They went down together into the hall where Colonel Tremaine, Lyddon, Richard, and Archie and a crowd of servants waited to tell him good-by. The farewells were hurried, as there was no time to spare. Neville said little, but under his self-control he was inwardly agitated. When he was in the act of stepping into the trap, Richard holding in two impatient horses, Neville turned back to grasp his father’s hand once more. At the same moment an old, blind hound came up to Neville and putting a humble, deprecating paw upon Neville’s knee, licked his hand, whining mournfully meanwhile. It seemed to Neville a sad portent. “Good-by, father,” he said. “If you should never shake hands with me again, remember if I haven’t been as good a son as I should be, no son ever loved a father and mother better than I loved you and my mother.” Colonel Tremaine, holding Neville’s hand, grew a little pale; some premonition of Neville’s meaning flashed upon him. He could only say brokenly: “You have ever been the best of sons to us.” And the next moment Neville was gone. CHAPTER V THE HOUR OF FATE The beginning of the fateful year of 1861 was full of events as dramatic as they were stupendous. State after State left the Union, her representatives withdrawing from the floors of Congress and her naval and military officers promptly resigning from the service of the United States. While these extraordinary and momentous changes were taking place all eyes were fixed upon the great State of Virginia, standing sentinel at the gateway between the North and the South. In case of Civil War all the world knew that she would be the battle ground. Her fields, rich and peaceful, where the harvesters had gleaned for two hundred years, would be drenched with blood and be swept by hurricanes of fire; the primeval woods over which an eternal peace had brooded would be torn by shot and riven by shell. The quiet towns would be starved and beleaguered and the placid country harried by fire and sword. Her people, who in the nineteenth century still lived in the calm and isolation of the eighteenth century and who had fallen into a happy lethargy, were to be suddenly transformed into an army of fighting men, and her women were to work and pray by night and day. Out of their placidity, which often degenerated into slothfulness, was to be evolved an almost superhuman energy. Her resources for war and siege would have been insignificant except that she held in reserve, ready to sacrifice at a moment’s notice, all the blood, all the powers, and all the possessions of a race justly described as a strong, resolute, and ofttimes violent people.