Richard, incapable of such an act, still had Pepper Pinckney for an ancestor. Ancestors leave us more than their pictures.
Having come to this momentous decision, he arrived at another.
One morning at breakfast he announced his intention of going to New York on business, he would start on the morrow and be gone a month. The Beauregards had always been bothering him to go on a visit and he might as well kill two birds with one stone.
Miss Pinckney made little resistance to the idea. She had noticed the coolness between the young people; knowing how much they cared one for the other she had little fear as to the end of the matter and she fancied a change might do good.
But to Phyl it seemed that the end of the world had come.
All that day she scarcely spoke except to Miss Pinckney. She was like a person stunned by some calamity.
Richard Pinckney, notwithstanding the fact that he was to leave for New York on the morrow, did not return to dinner that night. Phyl went upstairs early but she did not go to her room, she went to Juliet’s. Sorrow attracts sorrow. Juliet had always seemed more than a friend, more than a sister, even.
There were times when the ungraspable idea came before her that Juliet was herself. The vision of the Civil War sometimes came back to her and always with the hint, like a half veiled threat, that Richard the man she loved was Rupert the man she had loved, that following the dark law of duplication that works alike for types and events, forms and ideas, her history was to repeat the history of Juliet.
She had saved Richard from death at the hands of Silas Grangerson, her love for him had met Fate face to face and won, but Fate has many reserve weapons. She is an old warrior, and the conqueror of cities and kings does not turn from her purpose because of a momentary defeat.
Phyl shut the door of the room, put the lamp she was carrying on a table and opened the long windows giving upon the piazza. The night was absolutely still, not a breath of wind stirred the foliage of the garden and the faint sounds of the city rose through the warm night. The waning moon would not rise yet for an hour and the stars had the sky to themselves.