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She loosed his horse’s rein, and led it rapidly towards her own horse.

The War of the Carolinas

By MEREDITH NICHOLSON

THOMAS NELSON AND SONS

TO YOU AT THE GATE.

There was a daisy-meadow, that flowed brimming to the stone wall at the roadside, and on the wooded crest beyond a lamp twinkled in a house round which stole softly the unhurried, eddyless dusk. You stood at the gate, your arms folded on the top bar, your face uplifted, watching the stars and the young moon of June. I was not so old but that I marked your gown of white, your dark head, your eyes like the blue of mid-ocean sea-water in the shadow of marching billows. As my step sounded you looked up startled, a little disdainful, maybe; then you smiled gravely; but a certain dejection of attitude, a sweet wistfulness of lips and eyes, arrested and touched me; and I stole on guiltily, for who was I to intrude upon a picture so perfect, to which moon and stars were glad contributors? As I reached the crown of the road, where it dipped down to a brook that whispered your name, I paused and looked back, and you waved your hand as though dismissing me to the noisy world of men.

In other Junes I have kept tryst with moon and stars beside your gate, where daisies flow still across the meadow, and insect voices blur the twilight peace; but I have never seen again your house of shadows among the trees, or found you dreaming there at the gate with uplifted face and wistful eyes. But from the ridge, where the road steals down into the hollow with its fireflies and murmuring water, I for ever look back to the star- and moon-hung gate in the wall, and see your slim, girlish figure, and can swear that you wave your hand.

Katonah, June 30, 1908. M. N.

CONTENTS.

THE WAR OF THE CAROLINAS.

CHAPTER I. TWO GENTLEMEN SAY GOOD-BYE.

“IF anything really interesting should happen to me I think I should drop dead,” declared Ardmore, as he stood talking to Griswold in the railway station at Atlanta. “I entered upon this life under false pretenses, thinking that money would make the game easy, but here I am, twenty-seven years old, stalled at the end of a blind alley, with no light ahead; and to be quite frank, old man, I don’t believe you have the advantage of me. What’s the matter with us, anyhow?”

“The mistake we make,” replied Griswold, “is in failing to seize opportunities when they offer. You and I have talked ourselves hoarse a thousand times planning schemes we never pull off. We are cursed with indecision, that’s the trouble with us. We never see the handwriting on the wall, or if we do, it’s just a streak of hieroglyphics, and we don’t know what it means until we read about it in the newspapers. But I thought you were satisfied with the thrills you got running as a reform candidate for alderman in New York last year. It was a large stage, and the lime-light struck you pretty often. Didn’t you get enough? No doubt they’d be glad to run you again.”

Ardmore glanced hastily about and laid his hand heavily on his friend’s shoulder.

“Don’t mention it—don’t think of it! No more politics in mine. The world may go hang if it waits for me to set it right. What I want is something different, a real adventure—something with spice in it. I have bought everything money can buy, and now I’m looking for something that can’t be tagged with a price.”

“There’s your yacht and the open sea,” suggested Griswold.

“Sick of it! Sick to death of it!”

“You’re difficult, old man, and mighty hard to please. Why don’t you turn explorer and go in for the North Pole?”

“Perfectly bully! I’ve thought of it a lot, but I want to be sure I’ve cleaned up everything else first. It’s always up there waiting—on ice, so to speak—but when it’s done once there will be nothing left. I want to save that for the last call.”

“You said about the same thing when we talked of Thibet that first evening we met at the University Club, and now the Grand Lama sings in all the phonographs, and for a penny you can see him in a kinetoscope, eating his luncheon. I remember very well that night. We were facing each other at a writing-table, and you looked up timidly from your letter and asked me whether there were two g’s in aggravate; and I answered that it depended on the meaning—one g for a mild case, two for a severe one—and you laughed, and we began talking. Then we found out how lonesome we both were, and you asked me to dinner, and then took me to that big house of yours up there in Fifth Avenue and showed me the pictures in your art gallery, and we found out that we needed each other.”

“Yes, I had needed you all right!” And Ardmore sniffed dolefully, and complained of the smoke that was drifting in upon them from the train sheds. “I wish you wouldn’t always be leaving me. You ought to give up your job and amuse me. You’re the only chap I know who doesn’t talk horse or automobile or yacht, or who doesn’t want to spend whole evenings discussing champagne vintages; but you’re too good a man to be wasted on a college professorship. Better let me endow an institution that will make you president—there might be something in that.”

“It would make me too prominent, so that when we really make up our minds to go in for adventures I should be embarrassed by my high position. As a mere lecturer on ‘The Libelling of Sunken Ships’ in a law school, I’m the most obscure person in the world. And for another thing, we couldn’t risk the scandal of tainted money. It would be nasty to have your great-grandfather’s whisky deals with the Mohawk Indians chanted in a college yell.”

The crowd surged past them to the Washington express, and a waiting porter picked up Griswold’s bags.

“Wish you wouldn’t go. I have three hours to wait,” said Ardmore, looking at his watch, “and the only Atlanta man I know is out of town.”

“What did you say you were going to New Orleans for?” demanded Griswold, taking out his ticket and moving towards the gate. “I thought you exhausted the Creole restaurants long ago.”

“The fact is,” faltered Ardmore, colouring, “I’m looking for some one.”

“Out with it—out with it!” commanded his friend.