_'"
You observe that a lady has come into the story at last, as she was
bound to do. (You will hear of another and a very different one by
and by.) It is not my fault that she enters it so late--I tell of
things as they occurred--though a clever writer would have dragged
her in long before this. I wish to God I hadn't to bring her into it
at all. I slipped out her surname just now. . . .
It was through being a friend of mine that she comes into it.
Constantia Denistoun and I had ridden ponies, tickled for trout,
bird-nested, tumbled off trees, out of duck-punts, through forbidden
ice, and into every form of juvenile disgrace, together as boy and
girl. Her father and mine had been college friends, and (I believe)
had both fallen in love with my mother, at a College ball, and my
father won--but all on an understanding of honourable combat.
Denistoun set out to travel, quite in the traditional way of the
Rejected One. He was a Yorkshire squire with plenty of money, and
could afford the prescribed cure. He travelled as far as to
Virginia, U.S.A., where he halted, and wooed and won the heiress of a
wide estate of cotton and tobacco and a great Palladian house, all
devastated and ruined by the War, in which her father had fallen,
one of Lee's pet leaders of cavalry.
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