THE EARTH TREMBLED


CHAPTER I

MARY WALLINGFORD


At the beginning of the Civil War there was a fine old residence on
Meeting Street in Charleston, South Carolina, inhabited by a family almost
as old as the State. Its inheritor and owner, Orville Burgoyne, was a
widower. He had been much saddened in temperament since the death of the
wife, and had withdrawn as far as possible from public affairs. His
library and the past had secured a stronger hold upon his interest and his
thoughts than anything in the present, with one exception, his idolized
and only child, Mary, named for her deceased mother. Any book would be
laid aside when she entered; all gloom banished from his eyes when she
coaxed and caressed him.

She was in truth one to be loved because so capable of love herself. She
conquered and ruled every one not through wilfulness or imperiousness, but
by a gentle charm, all her own, which disarmed opposition.

At first Mr. Burgoyne had paid little heed to the mutterings which
preceded the Civil War, believing them to be but Chinese thunder, produced
by ambitious politicians, North and South. He was preoccupied by the study