the end they killed her with grief and care; they sent her sons,
every man of them, into the Southern armies, ravaged their
plantations, liberated their slaves, left them dead on the fields
of battle, or wrecked in health, hope, fortune. Gabriella, placed
in a boarding-school in Lexington at that last hurried parting with
her grandmother, stayed there a year. Then the funds left to her
account in bank were gone; she went to live with near relatives;
and during the remaining years of the war was first in one
household, then another, of kindred or friends all of whom
contended for the privilege of finding her a home. But at the close
of the war, Gabriella, issuing from the temporary shelters given
her during the storm, might have been seen as a snow-white pigeon
flying lost and bewildered across a black cloud covering half the
sky.

The third volume--the Peace Book in which there was no Peace: this
was the beginning of Gabriella, child of the Revolution. She did
not now own a human being except herself; could give orders to none
but herself; could train for this work, whip up to that duty, only
herself; and if, she was still minded to play the mistress--firm,
kind, efficient, capable--must be such a mistress solely to
Gabriella.

By that social evolution of the race which in one country after
another had wrought the overthrow of slavery, she had now been
placed with a generation unique in history: a generation of young
Southern girls, of gentle birth and breeding, of the most delicate
nature, who, heiresses in slaves and lands at the beginning of the
war, were penniless and unrecognized wards of the federal
government at its close, their slaves having been made citizens and