their interests and sympathies permitted to waltz with a Union officer,
and there would be a little dance. To these dances Stephen Brice was
usually invited.

One such occasion occurred on a Friday in January, and Mr. Brinsmade
himself called in his buggy and drove Stephen to the country early in the
afternoon. He and Anne went for a walk along the river, the surface of
which was broken by lumps of yellow ice. Gray clouds hung low in the sky
as they picked their way over the frozen furrows of the ploughed fields.
The grass was all a yellow-brown, but the north wind which swayed the
bare trees brought a touch of color to Anne's cheeks. Before they
realized where they were, they had nearly crossed the Bellegarde estate,
and the house itself was come into view, standing high on the slope above
the withered garden. They halted.

"The shutters are up," said Stephen. "I understood that Mrs. Colfax had
come out here not long a--"

"She came out for a day just before Christina," said Anne, smiling, "and
then she ran off to Kentucky. I think she was afraid that she was one of
the two women on the list of Sixty."

"It must have been a blow to her pride when she found that she was not,"
said Stephen, who had a keen remembrance of her conduct upon a certain
Sunday not a year gone.

Impelled by the same inclination, they walked in silence to the house and
sat down on the edge of the porch. The only motion in the view was the
smoke from the slave quarters twisting in the wind, and the hurrying ice
in the stream.