was the vital breath of the South; if she chose to go out and keep it,
had not freemen the right to choose their own government? To bring her
back by carnage was simply the old game of regal tyranny on republican
cards. So his head settled it: as for his heart,--his neighbors' houses
were in ashes, burned by the Yankees; his son lay dead at Manassas. He
died to keep them back, didn't he? "Geordy boy," he used to call
him,--worth a dozen puling girls: since he died, the old man had never
named his name. Scofield was a Rebel in every bitter drop of his heart's
blood.

He hurried to the house to prepare to go to the Union meeting. He had a
reason for going. The Federal troops held Romney then, a neighboring
village, and he knew many of the officers would be at this meeting.
There was a party of Confederates in Blue's Gap, a mountain-fastness
near by, and Scofield had heard a rumor that the Unionists would attack
them to-morrow morning: he meant to try and find out the truth of it, so
as to give the boys warning to be ready, and, maybe, lend them a helping
hand. Only for Dode's sake, he would have been in the army long ago.

He stopped on the porch to clean his shoes, for the floor was newly
scrubbed, and Miss Scofield was a tidy housekeeper, and had, besides, a
temper as hot and ready to light as her father's pipe. The old man
stopped now, half chuckling, peeping in at the window to see if all was
clear within. But you must not think for this that Dode's temper was the
bugbear of the house,--though the girl herself thought it was, and shed
some of the bitterest tears of her life over it. Just a feverish blaze
in the blood, caught from some old dead grandfather, that burst out now
and then.

Dode, not being a genius, could not christen it morbid sensibility; but