old gray horse, while his intimates were the neighboring farmers, with
whom he talked crops and politics by the hour.

In pained surprise Mrs. Herbert, a woman of great ambition, had endured
five years of this kind of life; with unspeakable bitterness of spirit
she had seen the once potent name of Daniel Herbert disappear from the
newspapers, and then she had died.

On her death the general became a rich and, in a way, a free man, for
now he could, without the silent protest of his wife, recover the
neglected lore of wood and field, and practise forgotten arts that had
in his boyhood come under the elastic head of chores. Elizabeth, his
daughter, had never shared her mother's ambitions. Perhaps because she
had always had it she cared nothing for society. She was well content to
ride about the farm with her father, whom she greatly admired, and at
whose eccentricities she only smiled.

In this agreeable comradeship with his daughter, General Herbert had
lived through the period of his bereavement with very tolerable comfort.
He had rendered the dead the dead's due of regretful tenderness; but
Elizabeth never asked him when he was going to make his reëntry into
politics; and she never reproached him with having wasted the very best
years of his life in trying to make four hundred acres of
scientifically farmed land show a profit, a feat he had not yet
accomplished.

Quitting the highway, North turned in at two stone pillars that marked
the entrance to Idle Hour and walked rapidly up the maple-lined driveway
to the great arched vestibule that gave to the house the appearance of a
Norman-French château.