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The ball was given by a gallant Delisleville Club in honour of Miss Delia Vanuxem, and it was a very magnificent affair indeed. The disguise of the dining-room was complete. It was draped with flags and decorated with wreaths of cedar and paper roses.
"I think it is possible I shall live in Delisleville," she whispered. His heart bounded as if it would burst his side. He knew what she meant in an instant, though he had never suspected it before. "Oh! Oh!" he groaned. "Oh, Delia! which which of them is it? It's De Courcy, I could swear. It's De Courcy!" "Yes," she faltered, "it is De Courcy." He drew his hand away and covered his face with it.
"I jes' 'member one thing, sah," he said; "dat you was a Southern gen'elman, and when a enemy's dead a Southern gen'elman don't cherish no harm agin him, an' you straight from Delisleville, an' you deed an' heerd it all, an' de Guv'ment ken see plain enough you's no carpet-bag jobber, an' ef a gen'elman like you tes'ify, an' say you was enemies an' you did pass shots count er dat flag, how's dey gwine talk any more about dis destructive disloyal business?
Williams Atkinson back to certain good old days in Delisleville, before his beloved South had been laid low and he had been driven far afield to live among strangers, an alien. For that reason he found himself moved by the recital and listened to it to its end. "But what has this to do with me?" he asked. "What do you want of me?"
He himself was a practical, driving, business schemer from New York. He knew the value of what he saw, and the availability of the material in consequence of a certain position in which the mines lay. Before he left Delisleville he had explained this with such a presenting of facts that the Judge had awakened to an enthusiasm as Southern as his previous indifference had been.
At twenty-three a man may be very young. Rupert was both young and old. His silent resentment of the shadow which he felt had always rested upon him, had become a morbid thing. It had led him to seclude himself from the gay little Delisleville world and cut himself off from young friendships.
These were days when stories of the Confederate flag were generally avoided. Northerners called it the rebel flag. Matt had had the discretion to avoid this mistake. He was wild with anxious excitement. Suddenly here had appeared a man who could give all the evidence desired, if he would do so. He had left Delisleville immediately on the close of the war and had not been heard of.
In such a hot-bed of secession as was Delisleville, the fact in question was indeed not easily explainable, except upon the grounds either of a Quixotic patriotism or upon those of a general disposition to contradictoriness. A Southern man, the head of a Southern family, the Judge opposed the rebellion and openly sided with the Government.
His cool pallor and dense darkness of eyes and hair seemed a delightful background to her young tints of bloom. "Thet thar white linen suit o' his'n," Mr. Doty said, "might hev been put on a-purpose to kinder set off her looks as well as his'n." It was to Mr. Doty Sheba went first. "Jake," she said, "this is my cousin Mr. Rupert De Willoughby from Delisleville."
"Well, I'm doggoned," the little man remarked, "I'd orter thought er thet. This yere's Delisleville, 'n' I reckerlect hearin' when fust he come to Hamlin thet he was some kin to some big bugs down ter D'lisleville, 'n' his father was a Jedge doggoned ef I didn't!" Rupert De Willoughby was lying upon the grass in the garden under the shade of a tree.
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