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For a little time after Virginia's passionate rejection of him Winton stood abashed and confounded. Weighed in the balance of the after-thought, his sudden and unpremeditated declaration could plead little excuse in encouragement. And yet she had been exceedingly kind to him. "I have no right to expect a better answer," he said finally, when he could trust himself to speak.
She and Engle had asked themselves the question as soon as Virginia's note came to them: "What in the world were she and Norton doing on the mountainside at that time of night?" But they had no intention of asking it of any one else. Rather John Engle hastened to answer it for others. "Muchachos" he said to the men when he sent them back to San Juan, "there was an accident last night.
You didn't let the Yankees frighten you But where is Jackson?" And so the whole miserable tale has to be told over again, between laughter and tears on Virginia's part, and laughter and strong language on Colonel Carvel's. What blessing that Lige met them, else the Colonel might now be starting for the Cumberland River in search of his daughter.
The Colonel was sitting in the shade of a wild grapevine rapping out a series of questions at Charley, but at sight of the young people coming back hand in hand, he paused and smiled understandingly. "What now?" he said. "Is there a new earth and a new heaven? Ah, well; then Virginia's trip was worth while. But Charley here is so full of signs and wonders that my brain is fairly in a whirl.
Young men proposed as naturally as they now ask a young girl to go for a walk, and were refused quite as naturally. An offer of marriage was not the fearful and wonderful thing to be dealt with gingerly which it has since become. Seventeen was often the age at which they began. And one of the big Catherwood boys had a habit of laying his heart and hand at Virginia's feet once a month.
She nodded a little curtly but not unkindly, and swept toward the door, which Guy opened and closed after her. Then he came slowly back, and, putting his arm around Virginia's waist, kissed her. "You don't want to see the house, do you?" he asked. Virginia shook her head. "Not a bit," she answered. "I think that we had better go away." "There is no hurry," he answered slowly.
"I don't believe it!" said Susan boldly, finding this attitude the most tenable in regard to Virginia's blindness. Georgie's news, if startling, was not all bad. "Perhaps it'll raise the hoodoo from all of us old maids!" said Susan, inelegantly, to Mr. Oliver. "O'Connor doesn't look as if he had sense enough to raise anything, even the rent!" answered Billy cheerfully.
True, around the well-remembered spot where our childhood's years were spent, recollection still loves to linger; yet memory, ever ready with its garnered store, paints in glowing colors, Virginia's crouching slaves in the foreground.
"Aren't you going, Virginia?" he inquired, as he hunted in the closet for his bag which she had not had time to pack. "I can't, Oliver. Harry isn't well. He has been unlike himself all day, and I am afraid to leave him." "He looks all right," he remarked, bending over the child in Virginia's lap. "Does anything hurt you, Harry?"
Many of these became leading men in the State, and their descendants still boast of their origin, and in plenary pride point to such men as William H. Crawford and Peter Early as shining evidences of the superiority of Virginia's blood. Most of these emigrants, however, were poor; but where all were poor, this was no degradation.
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