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Sitgreaves offered the same homage to Miss Peyton, and met with equal favor; the lady first pausing to draw on her gloves. Colonel Wellmere was honored with a smile from Sarah, while performing a similar duty; and Frances gave the ends of her taper fingers to Captain Lawton with maiden bashfulness.
Peyton in the porch, welcoming him with that maternal smile which his childish longing had so often craved to share with Susy. Peyton would be there, too, Peyton, who had once pushed back his torn straw hat to look approvingly in his boyish eyes; and Peyton, perhaps, might be proud of him. Suddenly he started. A voice in his very ear! "Bah!
"You think, then, they have an effect on the flux?" said the housekeeper, inquiringly. Miss Peyton rose and beckoned her nieces to give her their assistance in the adjoining pantry, while for a moment the dark visage of the attentive Lawton was lighted by an animation that vanished by an effort, as powerful and as sudden, as the one that drew it into being.
Peyton was shrewd enough to allow for the accidents of environment; what she wished to get at was the residuum of character beneath Miss Verney's shifting surface. "It looks charmingly," Mrs. Peyton repeated, giving a loosening touch to the chrysanthemums in a tall vase on her son's desk. Dick laughed, and glanced at his watch. "They won't be here for another quarter of an hour.
Old and tottering to his tomb is that veteran jurist. The possible heir would be Armand, the boy student, cut off in Paris. No home-comings now. The ports are all closed. When all is prepared, Colonel Valois says tenderly: "Peyton, I have some money left at Havana. I will endorse these drafts to you, and give you a letter to the banker there. You can keep them for me.
As the cannon roar their defiance to the men who hold them dear, Peyton bends over Maxime Valois. The heart is stilled forever. With his stiffening fingers clutching his last trophy, the "Stars and Stripes," there is the light of another world shining on the face of the dead soldier of the Southern Cross.
Peyton thinks now of the loved and lost who bore those flags, to-day furled forever, to the front, at Bull Run, Shiloh, the Seven Days, Groveton, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Chickamauga, and Spottsylvania. The foreign friends in Europe, the daring rovers of the sea who carried the Stars and Bars from off New York to Singapore and far Behring Straits. What peerless leaders.
Peyton impatiently. "As it seems you do remember that much," said Peyton dryly, "it is only just to him that I should tell you that it appears that he was not an impostor. His story was TRUE. I have just learned that Colonel Brant WAS actually his father, but had concealed his lawless life here, as well as his identity, from the boy.
Remain here unwatched until we leave the county, which will not be for some days." The distance in the manner of the English officer vanished, and taking the offered hand of the other, he replied with warmth, "Your generous confidence, Peyton, will not be abused, even though the gibbet on which your Washington hung Andre be ready for my own execution."
The speculator dares not tell Peyton his hopes, his fears, his suspicions. San Francisco is reached. Peyton has "done the Comstock." He is tired of drifts, gallery, machinery, miners, and the "laissez-aller" of Nevada hospitality. The comfort of Colonel Joe's bachelor establishment places the stranger in touch with the occidental city.
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