Sadness. Orry Main had shared it when he visited Lehigh Station. Just two weeks ago, it was. His courageous journey from South Carolina to Pennsylvania was laced with menace, and the visit itself had become a night of desperate danger when George's sister, Virgilia — extreme abolitionist, obsessive hater of all persons and things Southern — had betrayed Orry's presence to a mob that George held off at gunpoint until he could get his dear and honorable friend out of town.

After that had come — what? Not lassitude, not quite. He had coped with daily problems: contract proposals; uneasiness about Fenton's plight at home; a hundred things, small and large, with one excepted. Until tonight, he had somehow walled out understanding of the meaning of the war. The fire and the knife had destroyed that wall and retaught a basic lesson. The hell with fools who blithely predicted "only" a ninety-day conflict. You needed nothing but brief moments for death and ruin.

His head pounded. His stomach felt vile. Beyond the leveled wall he saw the threat from which he'd been trying to hide these past two weeks. It was a threat to the lives of those for whom he cared most in the world, a threat to the slowly forged bond between his family and that of the Mains of South Carolina. He'd been hiding from the truth about those lives, that bond. The fire had shown him they were perilously fragile. Fragile as Fenton, and the other two, and the house that had held them with all their passions, imperfections, dreams. Of them, that house, those emotions, nothing remained but that which followed George on the wind, spotting his collar, flicking his ear — ashes; blowing, blowing all around him.