Andrew the Glad

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.