Excerpt from The Diamond From the Sky: A Romantic Novel In Richmond, during the war, Judge Lamar Stanley had been high in the councils of the Cabinet of the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis. In the field his cousin Arthur Stanley followed the fortunes of the Confederate arms as a member of the staff of Gen eral Lee. The name of Colonel Stanley as the dashing leader of the Fairfax Light Horse Brigade still holds its place of honor in the gallant annals of the Lost Cause. In their youth, as now in their maturity, these men held a heritage of family hate. Crossing each other in love, crossing each other in martial, civic and social ambitions, their mutual hatred grew with their grow ing years. There were deep causes for all this in the thwarted social ambitions of the Judge. As the scion of the elder branch of the American Stanleys, spring ing from their common ancestor, Sir Arthur Stanley, a gentleman adventurer who had been exiled to Amer ica in 1615, Colonel Stanley held possession of the precious family heirloom, The Diamond from the Sky. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.