In those weeks since Christmas, life had gone on in outward quiet at Harrowby. Immediately after the Christmas time all dancing and frolicking in the county had suddenly come to an end. In one psychic moment the people realized that they had great business in hand. The women became more thoughtful and yet more enthusiastic than the men, and patriotism with them speedily assumed the form of a religion. This was singularly marked in the ladies of Harrowby. No human beings can live in the closeness of intimacy of the Harrowby family without a prescience concerning each other. A dreadful doubt had begun to haunt Mrs. Tremaine concerning Neville, her best beloved--he might give his sword not to his State, but to her enemies. Mrs. Tremaine dared not put this fear in words even to Colonel Tremaine. The same grim suspicion was likewise haunting him. He avoided Mrs. Tremaine’s eyes when they spoke together of Neville, each striving to hide from the other this specter which walked with them and sat at meat with them and was always within touch of them by day and by night. In the wintry afternoons when Mrs. Tremaine paced up and down the Ladies’ Walk a certain number of times, according to her daily habit for more than thirty years, those who approached her saw a strange expression on her face--an expression of fear and anxiety. Colonel Tremaine, watching her from his library window, forebore to go out and join her as he usually did, but instead strode restlessly like a caged lion up and down the library. Mrs. Tremaine, observing his figure as he passed the window, knew that the same fear was gnawing at his heart as at hers--the fear that their eldest-born should prove a renegade and a traitor, for so both parents considered the question of Neville’s remaining in the army. As the weeks wore on the tension of minds grew more acute, and it soon came to the point that Lyddon could no longer openly express his political views, which were totally opposed to slavery; the Southern people allowed no man freedom of conscience in the matter. Slavery, which for the first thirty years of the century had been frankly condemned and anxiously sought to be abolished by Washington, Jefferson, and all thinking men in the State, had in the next thirty years fastened itself, in all its monstrosity, upon the body politic and had stifled remonstrance. As John Randolph said: “The South had a wolf by the ears and was afraid to let go and afraid to hold on”; but as their fear of letting go was greater than their fear of holding on, they held on until they were half-devoured by this wolf called Slavery.