Wayne, roaming the house restlessly, drifted into the conservatory. It had been his sister’s habit to ignore what was practically ostracism as far as he was concerned socially. She realized the justice of his exclusion, but inwardly, with sisterly fidelity, resented it. There was a pathos in him that touched her; and as she saw him moving about alone, or joining some group where size minimized the danger of contamination, her heart ached for him. Wayne, as he lounged listlessly in the dining room door, saw Walsh in conversation with Mrs. Craighill a moment before Mrs. Blair rejoined them. Wayne stood just behind his father and several of Colonel Craighill’s auditors looked up and smiled, but without relaxing their attention.
“You young people,” Colonel Craighill was saying, “can’t be expected to love this town of ours as we old folks do, who, you might say, fought and bled for it. Even now,” he continued, adjusting his plate carefully upon his knee and lifting his eyes dreamily, “the Civil War period is as remote in the minds of the new generation as the Wars of the Roses.”
“Tell us a war story, Colonel!” cried a girl in the circle; “something really terrible—of how you led a forlorn hope, the flag lifted in one hand and your trusty sword in another, sprinting right over the ramparts at Saratoga or The Cowpens, or whatever the place was——”
Colonel Craighill joined in the laugh at his own expense, and appealed to the group:
“Doesn’t this prove what I was saying? You children know nothing of American history. I didn’t quite come over with Columbus, Julia. A few weeks ago I was talking to the president—I hadn’t really gone to Washington for the purpose but we got into it somehow——”
Wingfield, who had brought the prettiest of the débutantes down from the ballroom, paused a moment to catch the drift of the Colonel’s story. He was bound for the conservatory, where there were opportunities for the better study of his butterfly, who was a trifle awed by the attention of a grown man, one who had, in fact, been in her father’s class at Pennsylvania. Wayne, with something akin to a grin on his face, turned away abruptly out of hearing of his father’s voice, nodded to Wingfield and passed on. His friend, with the careless ease that distinguished him, had sighted a waiter and two chairs in a far corner of the conservatory and led the way thither.
“Did you hear Julia Morse sting the Colonel?” he asked the girl, as he unfolded his napkin. “I shall have to look her up; I’ve done her a cruel injustice. I supposed Julia was a stanch subscriber to the Craighill superstition, but she’s clearly deeper than I imagined. It’s odd I never knew Julia’s true worth; I’m annoyed by my own density. The salad—yes!”
“The Craighill superstition?” asked the girl, the knowledge and wisdom of Wingfield’s forty-three years towering over her youth and inexperience like a mighty cliff.
“Just that—quite that! The Colonel’s military greatness ranks with the ladder superstition, the Friday superstition, the thirteen at table superstition, and all those things.”
“But Colonel Craighill was a soldier in the Civil War—of course not in the Revolution, I know that.”