At Widewood that same hour there was deep silence. Since the first of the year the only hands left on the place were a decrepit old negro and wife, whom even he pronounced "wuthless," quartered beyond the stable-yard's farther fence. For some days this "lady" had been Widewood's only cook, owing to the fact that Mrs. March's servant, having a few nights before seen a man prowling about the place, had left in such a panic as almost to forget her wages, and quite omitting to leave behind her several articles of the Widewood washing.

Within the house John March sat reading newspapers. His healthy legs were crossed toward the flickering hearth, and his strong shoulders touched the centre-table lamp. The new batten shutters excluded the beautiful outer night. His mother, to whom the mail had brought nothing, was sitting in deep shadow, her limp form and her regular supply of disapproving questions alike exhausted. Her slender elbow slipped now and then from the arm of her rocking-chair, and unconscious gleams of incredulity and shades of grief still alternated across her face with every wrinkling effort of her brows to hold up her eyelids.

John was not so absorbed as he seemed. He felt both the silence and the closed shutters drearily, and was not especially cheered by the following irrelevant query in the paragraph before him:

"Who—having restored the sight of his jailer's blind daughter and converted her father from idolatry—was on this day beheaded?"

Yet here was a chance to be pleasant at the expense of a man quite too dead to mind.

"Mother," he began, so abruptly that Mrs. March started with a violent shudder, "this is February fourteenth. Did any ancient person of your acquaintance lose his head to-day?" He turned a facetious glance that changed in an instant to surprise. His mother had straightened up with bitter indignation, but she softened to an agony of reproach as she cried:

"John!"

"Why, mother, what?"

"Ah! John! John!" She gazed at him tearfully. "Is this what you've joined the church for? To cloak such——"

"My dear mother! I was simply trying to joke away the dismals! Why,"—he smiled persuasively—"if you only knew what a hard job it is." But the ludicrousness of her misconstruction took him off his guard, and in spite of the grimmest endeavor to prevent it, his smile increased and he stopped to keep from laughing.

Mrs. March rose, eloquent with unspoken resentment, and started from the room. At the door she cast back the blush of a martyr's forgiveness, and the next instant was in her son's big right arm. His words were broken with laughter.

"My dear, pretty little mother!" She struggled alarmedly, but he held her fast. "Why, I know the day is nothing to you, dear, less than nothing. I know perfectly well that I am your own and only valentine. Ain't I? Because you're mine now, you know, since I've turned over this new leaf."

The mother averted her face. "O my son, I'm so unused to loving words, they only frighten me."

But John spoke on with deepening emotion. "Yes, mother, I'm going to be your valentine, and yours only, as I've never been or thought of being in all my life before. I'm going to try my very best! You'll help me, won't you, little valentine mother?"

She lifted a glance of mournful derision. "Valentine me no valentines. You but increase my heart-loneliness. Ah! my self-deluded boy, your fickle pledges only mean, to my sad experience, that you have made your own will everything, and my wish nothing. Valentine me no valentines, let me go."

The young man turned abruptly and strode back to his newspapers. But he was too full of bitterness to read. He heard his mother's soft progress upstairs, and her slow step in the unlighted room overhead. It ceased. She must have sat down in the dark. A few moments passed. Then it sounded again, but so strange and hurried that he started up, and as he did so the cry came, frantic with alarm, from the upper hall, and then from the head of the stairs:

"John! John!"

He was already bounding up them. Mrs. March stood at the top, pale and trembling. "A man!" she cried, "with a gun! I saw him down in the moonlight under my window! I saw him! he's got a gun!"

She was deaf and blind to her son's beseechings to be quiet. He caught her hands in his; they were icy. He led her by gentle force down-stairs and back to her sitting-room seat.

"Why, that's all right, mother; that's what you made me put the shutters on down here for. If you'd just come and told me quietly, why, I might a' got him from your window. Did you see him?"

"I don't know," she moaned. "He had a gun. I saw one end of it."

"Are you sure it was a gun? Which end did you see, the butt or the muzzle?"

Mrs. March only gasped. She was too refined a woman to mention either end of a gun by name. "I saw—the—front end."

"He didn't aim it at you, or at anything, did he?"

"No—yes—he aimed it—sidewise."

"Sideways! Now, mother, there I draw the line! No man shall come around here aiming his gun sideways; endangering the throngs of casual bystanders!"

"Ah! John, is this the time to make your captive and beleaguered mother the victim of ribald jests?"

"My dear mother, no! it's a time to go to bed. If that fellow's still nosing 'round here with his gun aimed sideways he's protection enough! But seriously, mother, whatever you mean by being embargoed and blockaded——"

"I did not say embargoed and blockaded!"

"Why, my dear mother, those were your very words!"

"They were not! They were not my words! And yet, alas! how truly——" She turned and wept.

"O Lord! mother——"

"My son, you've broken the second commandment!"

"It was already broke! O for heaven's sake, mother, don't cave in in this hysterical way!"

The weeper whisked round with a face of wild beseeching. "O, my son, call me anything but that! Call me weak and credulous, too easily led and misled! Call me too poetical and confiding! I know I'm more lonely than I dare tell my own son! But I'm not—Oho! I'm not hysterical!" she sobbed.

So it continued for an hour. Then the lamp gave out and they went to bed.

The next morning John drove his mother to Suez for a visit of several days among her relatives, and rode on into Blackland to see if he could find "a girl" for Widewood. He spent three days and two nights at these tasks, stopping while in Blackland with—whom would you suppose? Proudfit, for all the world! He took an emphatic liking to the not too brainy colonel, and a new disrelish to his almost too sparkling wife.

As, at sunset of the third day, he again drew near Suez and checked his muddy horse's gallop at Swanee River Bridge, his heart leaped into his throat. He hurriedly raised his hat, but not to the transcendent beauties of the charming scene, unless these were Fannie Halliday and Barbara Garnet.