Old Rokesby Hall is long gone now. Even in the last century, or at least the latter half of it, the great Georgian mansion had fallen into ruin and decay. The broad, latticed, windows with their diamond shaped panes broken, the cagework of the upper stories dirty and dilapidated. The sombre lifeless avenue that swept from the coach road under the giant elms to the hall itself, overgrown and choked with weeds. Before the civil war it had been one of Virginia's proudest landmarks, until the death of the old Squire's wife...