The whole tale and its telling was absorbingly interesting to Caroline
Darrah Brown and she listened with enraptured attention to it all. She
repeated carefully the names of her mother's friends as they came up in
the conversation; and she was pathetically eager to know all about this
world she had come back into, from, what already seemed to her, her birth
in a strange land. Two days in this country of her mother, and the
enchantment of traditions that had been given to her unborn was already
at work with its spell!
And so they rambled around and talked, unheeding the time until the early
twilight began to fall and Mrs. Buchanan was summoned by Jeff to a
consultation in the domestic regions with the autocratic Tempie.
Left to herself, Caroline Darrah wandered back again through the rooms
from one object to another that inspired the stories. It was like
fairy-land to her and she was in a long dream of pleasure. Out of the
shadows she seemed to be drawing her wistful young mother, and hand in
hand they were going over the past together.
When it was quite deep into the twilight she sauntered back to the
crackling comfort of the major's fragrant logs. A discussion with Jeff
over his toilet had delayed the major in his bedroom and she found the
library deserted, but hospitable with firelight.
How long she had been musing and castle-building in the coals she
scarcely knew, when a step on the polished floor made her look up, and
with a little exclamation she rose to her full, slim, young height and
turned to face a man who had come in with the unannounced surety of a
member of the household. He was tall, broad and dark, and his
knickerbockers were splashed with mud and covered with clinging burrs and
pine-needles. One arm was lashed to his side with a silk sling and he
held a huge bunch of glowing red berries in his free hand. They were
branches of the red, coral-strung buck bushes and Caroline had never seen
them before. Their gorgeousness fairly took her breath and she exclaimed
with the ingenuous delight of a child.
"How lovely, how lovely!" she cried as she stretched out her hands for
them. "I never saw any before. Do they grow here?"
"Yes," answered the man with a gleam of amusement in his dark eyes, "yes,
they came from Seven Oaks. The fields are full of them now. Do you want
them?" And as he spoke he laid the bunch in her arms.
"And they smell woodsy and piny and delicious. Thank you! I--they are
lovely. I--" She paused in wild confusion, looked around the room as if
in search of some one, and ended by burying her face in the berries. "I
don't know where Major Buchanan is," she murmured helplessly.