Vance had been told that breakfast would be at nine; and, awakened at half-past seven by a bird on the bough in his window, he abandoned himself to a lazy review of his impressions of the family. Of his Cousin Eve he had seen little more than what has already been told. After filling her place at a bounteous supper-table, where the talk was chiefly absorbed by the three gentlemen, she had vanished, in company with the widowed cousin, and was invisible thereafter--the men sitting together till midnight in the large, raftered hall, with a fire in its wide chimney, that served the old bachelor for a general living-room.
Vance could not remember to have seen a face of finer lines, a manner of finer courtesy, than that of his seventy-year-old host, who, in spite of the rust of desuetude in worldly ways, carried his inbred gentility where all who approached him might profit by it.
That he was a politician went without saying; and, indeed, the talk once directed in the channel of national government had kept there until they separated. On a claw-footed table holding a lamp beside Mr. Lloyd's easy chair, covered with frayed haircloth, Vance saw lying a crisp new Review of English publication, and all about were piled newspapers and magazines, while shelves displayed row upon row of the antique, tawny volumes that had made up the complete library of a country gentleman in the days of old Josephus's grandfather.
Around the hearth, coming and going with every opening of many doors, gathered dogs of fine and varied breeds. One old patriarch of a St. Bernard, who attached himself particularly to the stranger, had remained close to Vance's feet, and gravely escorted him to bed.
In his kinsman, Guy Carlyle, a handsome man of fifty odd years, who in a military youth had been noted for deeds of daring that rang through the army of Northern Virginia, but had long since resigned himself to the peaceful pursuits of agriculture, Vance saw the origin of Eve's rare beauty. He also became aware that, of a large family of sons and daughters born to the now widowed Colonel, Eve was the sole survivor; and it did not need the expression that irradiated her father's face when her name was touched upon to show in what estimation she was held by him.