that, in the daring new fashion, bared the full, firm swell of her breasts.

Beauregard took her in his arms, and as her lips clung to his he felt a grey old man, as grey as his braid-hung uniform. He held her away from him. In the mirror behind her he saw his face, stern, weather-beaten, light-mustached, with startling blue eyes.

"Piquette, what on earth is this folly?" he demanded, kicking the door shut behind him. "Don't you know I'm moving on Tullahoma in the morning?"

"You know I wouldn't call you unless it was important, Gard, as much as I long for you." When she talked, her delicately molded face was as mobile as quicksilver. "I've found something that may end the war and save my people."

"Dammit, Quette, how many times have I told you they are not your people? You're a quadroon. You're three-fourths white, and a lot whiter in your heart than some white women I've seen."

"But I'm one-fourth Negro, and you wouldn't have married me, for that, even if you'd known me before you met your Lucy. Isn't that right, Gard?"

"Look, Quette, just because things are the way they are...."

She hushed him with a finger on his lips.

"The Negroes are my people, and the white people are my people," she said. "If the world were right. I'd be a woman instead of a thing in between, scorned by both. Can't you see that, Gard? You're not like most Southerners."

"I am a Southerner," he answered proudly. "That I love you above my own blood makes no difference. No, I don't hate the black man, as so many Southerners do—and Northerners too, if the truth were known. But, by God, he's not my equal, and I won't have him ruling over whites."

"This is an old argument," she said wearily, "and it isn't why I called you here. I've found a man—or, rather, a man has found me—who can end this war and give my people the place in the world they deserve."

Beauregard raised his bushy eyebrows, but he said nothing. Piquette took him by the hand and led him from the hall into the spacious living room.

A Negro man sat there on the sofa, behind the antique coffee table. He was well-dressed in a civilian suit. His woolly hair was grey and his eyes shone like black diamonds in his wizened face.

"General Courtney, 

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