Confederate, a self-expatriated exile. On the eve of his departure for
France he had married the Virginia maiden who had nursed him alive after
Chancellorsville. Major Caspar had given the bride away,--the war had
spared no kinsman of hers to stand in this breach,--and when the
God-speeds were said, had himself turned back to the weed-grown fields
of Deer Trace Manor, embittered and hostile, swearing never to set foot
outside of his home acres again while the Union should stand.

For more than twenty years he kept this vow almost literally. A few of
the older negroes, a mere handful of the six score slaves of the old
patriarchal days, cast in their lot with their former master, and with
these the Major made shift thriftily, farming a little, stockraising a
little, and, unlike most of the war-broken plantation owners, clinging
tenaciously to every rood of land covered by the original Dabney
title-deeds.

In this cenobitic interval, if you wanted a Dabney colt or a Dabney cow,
you went, or sent, to Deer Trace Manor on your own initiative, and you,
or your deputy, never met the Major: your business was transacted with
lean, lantern-jawed Japheth Pettigrass, the Major's stock-and-farm
foreman. And although the Dabney stock was pedigreed, you kept your wits
about you; else Pettigrass got much the better of you in the trade, like
the shrewd, calculating Alabama Yankee that he was.

Ardea was born in Paris in the twelfth year of the exile; and the
Virginian mother, pining always for the home land, died in the fifteenth
year. Afterward, Captain Louis fought a long-drawn, losing battle,
figuring bravely in his infrequent letters to his father as a rising
miniature painter; figuring otherwise to the students of the Latin
Quarter as "_ce pauvre Monsieur D'Aubigné_;" leading his little girl