I tried to sink out of sight, but they saw me, demolished my barricade, and began to tease me. The quartet were Charlie Murray, George Van B----, Willie, and Page. Behind them came a fifth gentleman, and before this fifth gentleman and I knew what was happening we were being presented to each other. And that is how I met Dan Grey--sitting on the floor in my shabbiest dress and half hidden by evergreens. I soon had the whole party hard at work festooning the hall, and what a good, if late, laborer, Dan Grey made in my vineyard! “You see how useful I am,” he said--he was standing on a box and I was handing up wreaths of cedar which he was arranging on the wall. “Now, why didn’t you let me come to see you?” “Me?” I asked in utter bewilderment. “Yes, ‘me’!” “Why, I never had a thing to do with your not coming to see me.” He gave George, Charlie, and Willie a withering look. “I reckon somebody else didn’t want me to.” The boys looked dumfounded. “I heard,” said Dan from his box, “that you didn’t want me to come to see you, that you had an unaccountable prejudice against me because you didn’t like Dick, that you asked all your friends by no means to bring me to see you.” I was as mad as I could be with George, Willie, and Charlie. “Why,” I said, “you are not your brother Dick. And then, I don’t dislike Dick at all.” Again the trio looked at me as if they doubted the evidence of their senses. “Nell, what did you tell such a story for?” George asked me privately later. “Why, I didn’t tell any story at all,” I declared. “He isn’t his brother Dick, is he? And I don’t dislike Dick now.” The night of the fair I wore a black bombazine, cut low in the neck and with long angel sleeves falling away from my arms above the elbow to the hem of my dress, and around my neck a band of black velvet with a black onyx cross. I sat or stood behind Mrs. Winton’s booth, and Mr. Grey haunted the booth all the evening, and bought quantities of things he had no use for. After the fair he saw me or reminded me of his existence in some way every day. Mother took me, about this time, on a visit to some cousins in Birdville, and every day Mr. Grey rode out on Dare Devil, the horse that he was to ride into his first fight. There was another fair. I went in from Birdville to help, and had the same coterie of assistants. “Ben Bolt” was a great favorite then. It was a new song and divided honors with “Sweet Nellie is by my Side.” My assistants used to sit on a goods box that was later to be converted into an ornamental stand, and sing, “O don’t you Remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?” Well, to make a long story short--as Dan and I did--we were married in exactly four months and a half from the day on which he was introduced to me as I sat cross-legged among the evergreens; and when Willie and George and Charlie came up to congratulate us, every wretch of them said, “Didn’t I tell you you ought to meet Dan Grey?” CHAPTER III THE FIRST DAYS OF THE CONFEDERACY