This was their first Christmas at Holly Lodge, but as Betty said to the Colonel on the afternoon of Christmas Eve:
"Granddaddy, I mean this to be the very happiest Christmas we ever had, because we are together, and your rheumatism is better, and I am going to a dance every night this week, and have a perfectly brand new white muslin gown to wear, and goodness knows what will be left of it after six dances, because I never really begin to enjoy myself until I have torn my gown all to pieces!"
While Betty was saying this, she was standing, delicately poised, on a table, putting a wreath of laurel leaves around the portrait of Colonel Beverley, taken in his youth, when he was a boy officer, with his first epaulets, his hand sternly grasping his sword. Above the portrait hung the same sword, and Betty was wont to decorate the hilt with a sprig of laurel, too. The portrait was a handsome picture, and the Colonel was secretly proud of it. A part of Betty's outrageous flattery of Colonel Beverley was that to assure the Colonel, solemnly, that nothing would induce her to marry until she could find a man as handsome as he was in his youth. The Colonel, sitting in his great chair, listened to this for the hundredth time with the greatest pleasure. Since that St. Martin's summer of his youth, there had been a long period of tranquil life at Rosehill. Then had come the great tragedy of the wartime, and Colonel Beverley had put on a gray uniform, and ridden at the head of the regiment the county raised, his stalwart son, Betty's father, riding by his bridle. The Colonel came back in four years to Rosehill, but the young son lay buried on the Bed of Honor, with a bullet through his brave young heart. Betty was a dark-eyed baby girl in those days. Now, she was a dark-eyed girl of twenty, and was all the Colonel had left in this world. Even Rosehill went with the rest. The back of Colonel Beverley's chair was against the window which looked toward Rosehill, for the Colonel was sixty-eight, and could not forget wholly the sixty-seven years when Rosehill had been his home, and did not like to look toward the place. To make it worse, Rosehill had been bought by some rich Northern people, who had wickedly and sacrilegiously, as the Colonel considered, put a furnace in the house, electric lights and many other modern and devilish inventions, which harrowed the Colonel's soul. So, like a wise man, he turned his eyes away.