Adam was quiet for a long while. “I think,” he said at last, “because I knew that nothing I could say would help any longer. No one was listening to reason, only to passion. The people I thought wanted peace turned out to want victory more. Fort Sumter changed them, you see. It didn’t matter that no one had died there, the bombardment proved to them that the slave states would never yield to reason, and then they demanded that I add my voice to their demands, and those demands weren’t for moderation anymore, but for the destruction of all this.” He gestured at the Faulconer domain, at the sweet fields and heavy trees. “They wanted me to attack Father and his friends, and I refused to do it. So I came home instead.”

“But you won’t fight?”

“I don’t think so.”

Starbuck frowned. “You’re braver than me, Adam, my God you are.”

“Am I? I wouldn’t have dared run away with a, with a”—Adam paused, unable to find a word delicate enough to describe the very indelicate Dominique—“I wouldn’t have dared risk my whole life for a whim!” He made it sound admirable instead of shameful.

“It was nothing but stupidity,” Starbuck confessed.

“And you’d never do it again?” Adam asked with a smile, and Starbuck thought of Sally Truslow, and said nothing. Adam plucked a blade of grass and twisted it about his finger. “So what do you think I should do?”

So Adam’s mind was not made up after all? Starbuck smiled. “I’ll tell you exactly what to do. Just go along with your father. Play at soldiers, enjoy the encampment, have a marvelous summer. Peace will come, Adam, maybe after one battle, but peace will come, and it will be soon. Why ruin your father’s happiness? What do you gain by doing that?”

“Honesty?” Adam suggested. “I have to live with myself, Nate.”

Adam found living with himself difficult, as Nate well knew. Adam was a stern and demanding young man, especially of himself. He might forgive weakness in others, but not in his own character. “So why did you come back?” Starbuck went on the attack. “Just to raise your father’s hopes before disappointing him? My God, Adam, you talk about my duty to my father, what’s yours? To preach to him? To break his heart? Why are you here? Because you expect your tenants and neighbors to fight, but think you can sit the battle out because you’ve got scruples? My God, Adam, you’d have done better to stay in the North.”

Adam paused a long time before responding. “I’m here because I’m weak.”

“Weak!” That was the last quality Starbuck would have ascribed to his friend.