It was a beautiful morning of early October in the mountain region of Virginia. The old Fitzhugh homestead, now the property of an Englishman who had married the only daughter of the impoverished family and bought in the home from creditors with good British gold, reared its dull red sides from amid a mass of sugar maples, larches and sycamore trees, and seemed with its widely opened doors, to proclaim an endless hospitality. The passer-by caught a glimpse of rambling out-houses whose chimneys shed lazy wreaths of smoke from pine wood fires, and if near enough he might have sniffed the pleasant odor of savory cookery from the rear building where Aunt Rose, the old-time cook, exercised her skill to please her epicure master, or tempt the less robust appetite of her young mistress. Mrs. Meeks stood at this moment in the middle of the sitting-room, her arms clasped over a broom, and her dark eyes gazing upon the floor in front of her. But her meditations had nothing to do with the rug where the broom rested, nor yet with the sun-lit slope of the Blue Ridges that extended in all their wealth of autumn beauty in front of the open windows.