line from the three aspens, towered a huge sycamore, and from one of its protecting arms, shaded by large fan-like leaves, a child’s swing dangled by a thick hemp rope.  Near the sycamore, where an old oak had fallen, the rotting stump was hidden by a high “rockery,” edged with conch shells, and over the rough gray rocks a tangle of garden flowers ran wild—­sweet-william, petunias, phlox, and the mossy stems of red and yellow portulaca.  On the western side of the house there was a spreading mimosa tree, its sensitive branches brushing the green shutters of a window in the second story.

The Hall had been built by the general’s father when, because of family dissensions, he had decided to move from a central county to the more thinly settled country surrounding Kingsborough.  There the general had passed his boyhood, and there he had left his wife when he had gone to the war.  At the beginning of the struggle he had freed his slaves and buckled on his sword.

“They may have the negroes, and welcome,” he had said to the judge.  “Do you think I’d fight for a damned darkey?  It’s the principle, sir—­the principle!”

And the judge, who had not freed his servants, but who would as soon have thought of using a profane word as of alluding in disrespectful terms to a family portrait, had replied gravely: 

“My dear Tom, you will find principle much better to fight for than to live on.”

But the general had gone with much valour and more vehemence.  He had enlisted as a private, had risen within a couple of years to a colonelcy, and had been raised to the rank of general by the unanimous voice of his neighbours upon his return home.  After an enthusiastic reception at Kingsborough he had mounted a heavy-weight horse and ridden out to the Hall, to find the grounds a tangle of weeds and his wife with the pallor of death upon her brow.  She had rallied at his coming, had lingered some sad years an invalid in the great room next the parlour, and had died quietly at last as she knelt in prayer beside her high white bed.

For days after this the empty house was like a coffin.  The children ran in tears through the shuttered rooms, and the servants lost their lingering shred of discipline.  When the funeral was over, the general made some spasmodic show of authority, but his heart was not in it, and he wavered for lack of the sustaining hold of his wife’s frail hand.  He dismissed the overseer and undertook to some extent the management of the farm, but the crops failed and the hay rotted in the fields before it was got into the barn.  Then, as things were galloping from bad to worse, a letter came from his sister, Miss Christina, and in a few days she arrived with a cartload of luggage and a Maltese cat in a wicker basket.  From the moment when she stepped out of the carriage at the end of the avenue and ascended the box-trimmed walk to the stone steps, the difficulties disentangled and the domestic problems dwindled into