"She's resting now and I think she ought to be quiet for to-day, because

she has been under a strain," answered Mrs. Buchanan as she glanced

tenderly at a closed door across the hall. "Oh, I'm so glad you think you

are going to love her in spite of--of--"

"The Brown graft on the Darrah family tree?" finished David quizzically.

His eyes danced with delighted amusement across her puffs at the major as

he added, "Must have been silversmiths dangling on most of his ancestral

branches, judging from his propensity for making dollars; a million or

two, stocks, bonds, any kind of flimflam,--eh, Major?"

"Yes," answered the major as he blew a ring of smoke into the air, "yes,

just about that; any kind of flimflam. And I can not conceive of Peters

Brown rejoicing at having thirty thousand of those dollars put into an In

Memoriam to the women who sniffed at him and his carpetbags for a good

twenty years after the war. But the child doesn't take any of that in.

Those were twenty rich years he put in in reconstructing us, but when he

took those same heavy carpetbags North he took Mary Caroline Darrah, the

prettiest woman in the county with him. This girl--as I have said before,

isn't love a strange thing? And you say the populace was astonished?"

"Almost to the point of paralyzation," answered David as he filled a

stray pipe with some of the major's most choice heart-leaf tobacco. "But

we managed to open up the picture show all right. The entire hive of busy

art-bees was there in a queer kind of clothes; but proud of it. They

acted as if we were dirt under their feet. They smiled on the whole

glad-crowd of us with pity and let us rave over the wrong pictures. The

portrait of Mrs. Peyton Kendrick by the great Susie Carrie Snow

is--er--well, a little more of it shows than seems natural about the left

off arm, but it's a Susie Carrie all right. You ought to have gone,

Major, you would take with the art-gang, but we didn't; we were too

afraid of them. After we had been shooed in front of most of the pictures

and told how to see things in them that weren't there at all, Hob Capers

said: "'Let's all go down to the University Club and get drunk to forget 'em.'

That's why Mrs. Matilda came home so late."

"And I want Hobson to be nice to her too," continued Mrs. Buchanan as if

she had not been interrupted in planning for her guest. "And Tom and

Peyton Kendrick. I'll ask them to come and see her right away."

"Don't! Wait a bit, Mrs. Matilda," exclaimed David. "Hob saw a mysterious

girl in an orchid hat out in the park day before yesterday. He says his

heart creaked with expansion at just the glimpse of a chin he got from

under her veil. Suppose she's the girl. Let him have first innings."




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