Marching with them in the hot sun, neatly bearded, the pain of his healing chest wound almost gone, Billy Hazard strode along with pride and vigor. He glanced toward the stand where his family should be sitting. Yes, he saw his wife's lovely, luminous face as she waved. Then he noticed his brother and nearly lost the cadence. George looked abstracted, grim.

The brass band blared, sweeping the engineers past the special stands through a rain of flowers.

Constance, too, saw something amiss. After Billy went by, she asked George about it.

"Oh, I finally found Thad Stevens. That's all."

"That isn't all. I can see it. Tell me."

George gazed at his wife, weighed down again by that feeling of hovering disaster. The premonition was not directly related to Stevens, yet he was a part of the tapestry.

A similar feeling had come over George in April of 1861, when he watched a house in Lehigh Station burn to the ground. He had stared at the flames and visualized the nation afire, and he had feared the future. It had not been an idle fear. He'd lost Orry, and the Mains had lost the great house at Mont Royal, and the war had cost hundreds of thousands of lives and nearly destroyed the bonds between the families. This foreboding was much like that earlier one.

He tried to minimize it to Constance, shrugging. "I expressed my views, and he put them down, pretty viciously. He wants congressional control of reconstruction and he wants blood from the South." George didn't mean to grow emotional, but he did. "Stevens is willing to go to war with Mr. Johnson to get what he wants. And I thought it was time to bind up the Union. God knows our family's suffered and bled enough. Orry's, too."

Constance sighed, searching for some way to ease his unhappiness. With a forced smile on her plump face, she said, "Dearest, it's only politics, after all —"

"No. It's much more than that. I was under the impression that we were celebrating because the war is over. Stevens set me straight. It's only starting."