future seemed so secure; and Mary Ellen herself, tall and slender,
bound to be stately and of noble grace, seemed so eminently fit to be a
Beauchamp beauty and a Fairfax bride.

For the young people themselves it may be doubted if there had yet
awakened the passion of genuine, personal love. They met, but, under
the strict code of that land and time, they never met alone. They rode
together under the trees along the winding country roads, but never
without the presence of some older relative whose supervision was
conventional if careless. They met under the honeysuckles on the
gallery of the Beauchamp home, where the air was sweet with the
fragrance of the near-by orchards, but with correct gallantry Henry
Fairfax paid his court rather to the mother than to the daughter. The
hands of the lovers had touched, their eyes had momentarily
encountered, but their lips had never met. Over the young girl's soul
there sat still the unbroken mystery of life; nor had the reverent
devotion of the boy yet learned love's iconoclasm.

For two years Colonel Fairfax had been with his regiment, fighting for
what he considered the welfare of his country and for the institutions
in whose justice he had been taught to believe. There remained at the
old Fairfax home in Louisburg only the wife of Colonel Fairfax and the
son Henry, the latter chafing at a part which seemed to him so
obviously ignoble. One by one his comrades, even younger than himself,
departed and joined the army hastening forward toward the throbbing
guns. Spirited and proud, restive under comparisons which he had never
heard but always dreaded to hear. Henry Fairfax begged his mother to
let him go, though still she said, "Not yet."

But the lines of the enemy tightened ever about Louisburg. Then came a