“That is her only safety,” exclaimed Reybold. “I hope to break every string that holds her to yonder barren honour and exhausted soil.” He pointed toward Virginia, and hastened away to the Capitol. All the way up the squalid and muddy avenue of that day he mused and wondered: “Who is Fitzhugh? Is there such a person any more than a Judge Basil? And yet there is a Judge, for Joyce has told me so. She, at least, cannot lie to me. At last,” he thought, “the dream of my happiness is over. Invincible in her prejudice as all these Virginians, Joyce Basil has made her bed among the starveling First Families, and there she means to live and die. Five years hence she will have her brood around her. In ten years she will keep a boarding-house and borrow money. As her daughters grow up to the stature and grace of their mother, they will be proud and poor again and breed in and out, until the race will perish from the earth.”

Slow to love, deeply interested, baffled but unsatisfied, Reybold made up his mind to cut his perplexity short by leaving the city for the county of Fauquier. As he passed down the avenue late that afternoon, he turned into E street, near the theatre, to engage a carriage for his expedition. It was a street of livery stables, gambling dens, drinking houses, and worse; murders had been committed along its sidewalks. The more pretentious canaille of the city harboured there to prey on the hotels close at hand and aspire to the chance acquaintance of gentlemen. As Reybold stood in an archway of this street, just as the evening shadows deepened above the line of sunset, he saw something pass which made his heart start to his throat and fastened him to the spot. Veiled and walking fast, as if escaping detection or pursuit, the figure of Joyce Basil flitted over the pavement and disappeared in a door about the middle of this Alsatian quarter of the capital.

“What house is that?” he asked of a constable passing by, pointing to the door she entered.

“Gambling den,” answered the officer. “It used to be old Phil Pendleton’s.”

Reybold knew the reputation of the house: a resort for the scions of the old tidewater families, where hospitality thinly veiled the paramount design of plunder. The connection established the truth of Mrs. Basil’s statement. Here, perhaps, already married to the dissipated heir of some unproductive estate, Joyce Basil’s lot was cast for ever. It might even be that she had been tempted here by some wretch whose villainy she knew not of. Reybold’s brain took fire at the thought, and he pursued the fugitive into the doorway. A negro steward unfastened a slide and peeped at Reybold knocking in the hall; and, seeing him of respectable appearance, bowed ceremoniously as he let down a chain and opened the door.

“Short cards in the front saloon,” he said; “supper and faro back. Chambers on the third floor. Walk up.”

Reybold only tarried a moment at the gaming tables, where the silent, monotonous deal from the tin box, the lazy stroke of the markers, and the transfer of ivory “chips” from card to card of the sweatcloth, impressed him as the dullest form of vice he had ever found. Treading softly up the stairs, he was attracted by the light of a door partly ajar, and a deep groan, as of a dying person. He peeped through the crack of the door and beheld Joyce Vasil leaning over an old man, whose brow she moistened with her handkerchief. “Dear father,” he heard her say, and it brought consolation to more than the sick man. Reybold threw open the door and entered into the presence of Mrs. Basil and her daughter. The former arose with surprise and shame and cried:

“Jedge Basil, the Dutch have hunted you down. He’s here— the Yankee creditor.”

Joyce Basil held up her hand in imploration, but Reybold did not heed the woman’s remark. He felt a weight rising from his heart, and the blindness of many months lifted from his eyes. The dying mortal upon the bed, over whose face the blue billow of death was rolling rapidly, and whose eyes sought in his daughter’s the promise of mercy from on high, was the mysterious parent who had never arrived—the Judge from Fauquier. In that old man’s long waxed moustache, crimped hair, and threadbare finery the Congressman recognised old Beau, the outcast gamester and mendicant, and the father of Joyce and Uriel Basil.