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 go down among the captains and the shouting, but he had the genius of waiting. Then he was a pleasant man at dinner—and his four years' army service had given him a soldierly frankness and directness. He lived with Miles in a simple and quiet way in Washington. He did not go out much, as indeed he had no time. He became quite cynical to himself about women. The pretty girls from New York were quite captivated with the young man from Virginia. They wanted to know all about his lovely old place, especially one charming bud, Miss de Peyster.

"Come and see it," Pembroke would answer good-naturedly. "Half the house was burned up by our friends, the enemy—the other half is habitable."

"And haven't you miles and miles of fields and forests, like an English nobleman?" the gay creature asked.

"Oh yes. Miles and miles. The taxes eat up the crops, and the crops eat up the land."

"How nice," cried the daughter of the Knickerbockers. "How much more romantic it is to have a broken down old family mansion and thousands of acres of land, than to be a stockbroker or a real estate man—and then to have gone through the whole war—and to have been promoted on the field—"

Pembroke smiled rather dolefully. His ruined home, his mortgaged acres, Miles' life-long trouble, his four years of marching and starving and fight