Silence fell between them, while they gazed through the veil of twilight at the marble shaft above the grave of the Confederate soldier. Then suddenly Susan spoke in a constrained voice, without turning her head. "Jinny, Oliver isn't one bit of a hero--not the kind of hero we used to talk about." It was with difficulty, urged by a vigorous and uncompromising conscience, that she had uttered the words. "And besides," retorted Virginia merrily, "he is in love with Abby Goode." "I don't believe that. They stayed in the same boarding-house once, and you know how Abby is about men." "Yes, I know, and it's just the way men are about Abby." "Well, Oliver isn't, I'm sure. I don't believe he's ever given her more than a thought, and he told me last night that he couldn't abide a bouncing woman." "Does Abby bounce?" "You know she does--dreadfully. But it wasn't because of Abby that I said what I did." Something quivered softly between them, and a petal from the Jacqueminot rose in Virginia's hair fluttered like a crimson moth out into the twilight. "Was it because of him, then?" she asked in a whisper. For a moment Susan did not answer. Her gaze was on the flight of steps, and drawing Virginia with her, she began to walk slowly toward the terraced side of the garden. An old lamplighter, carrying his ladder to a lamp-post at the corner, smiled up at them with his sunken toothless mouth as he went by. "Partly, darling," said Susan. "He is so--I don't know how to make you understand--so unsettled. No, that isn't exactly what I mean."