The scene flashed before her as she tore the envelope open, his sudden blaze of anger, the way he had torn the papers up, his departure. What was he going to say to her now? She flushed at the thought that this thing in her hand might prove to be his opinion of her in cold blood, a reproof, a remonstrance—she opened the folded sheet—ah!

"Dear Phyl,

"Aunt Maria was greatly disappointed when I returned here without you, she had quite made up her mind that you were coming back with me. We both lost our temper that day, but I was the worse, for I said a word I shouldn't have said, and for which I apologise. Aunt Maria says it was the Pinckney temper. However that may be, we shall be delighted to see you. Mrs. Van Dusen leaves on the 6th of next month. I am sending all particulars to Mr. Hennessey. You could meet Mrs. Van Dusen at Liverpool and go with her as far as New York. Let me have a cable to know if you are coming. Pinckney, Vernons, Charleston, U. S. A., is the cable address.

"Your affectionate guardian—also cousin— "R. Pinckney."

Then underneath, in an angular, old-fashioned hand, one of those handwritings we associate with crossed letters, rosewood desks, valentines and wafers:

"Be sure to come. I am very anxious to see you, and I only hope you will like me as much as I am sure to like you.

"Maria Pinckney."

Phyl caught her breath back when she read this and her eyes filled with tears. It was the woman's voice that touched her, coming after Pinckney's business-like and jerky sentences.

Then she sat with the letter before her, looking at the new prospect it had opened for her.

Was Pinckney still angry, despite his talk about the Pinckney temper; had he written not of his own free will but at the desire of Maria Pinckney? She read the thing over again without finding any solution to this question.

But one fact was clear. Maria Pinckney was genuine in her invitation.

"I'll go," said Phyl.

She rose up from the table as though determined then and there to start off for America, left the room, went upstairs and knocked at Mrs. Hennessey's door.

That lady was sitting up in bed with a stocking tied round her throat—she was suffering from a slight attack of tonsilitis—and the Irish Times spread on her knees.

"Mrs. Hennessey," said Phyl, "I have just had a letter from my cousins in America, and they want me to go out to them."

"Want you to go to America!" said Mrs. Hennessey. "On a visit, I suppose?"

"No, to stay there."

"To stay in America; but what on earth do they want you to do that for? Who on earth would dream of leaving Dublin to live in America! It's extraordinary the ideas some people get hold of. Then, of course, they don't know, that's all that's to be said for them. It's like hearing people talking and talking of all the fine views abroad, and you'd think they'd never seen the Dargle or the Glen of the Downs; they don't know the beauty of their own country or haven't eyes to see it, and they must go raving of the Bay of Naples with Kiliney Bay a stone's throw away from them, and talking of Paris with Dublin outside their doors, and praising up foreign actors with never a word of the Irish Players. Dublin giving her best to them, and they with deaf ears to her music and blind eyes to her sons."

"But, you see, Mrs. Hennessey, the Pinckneys are my relations."

"Irish?" cried the good woman, absolutely unconscious of everything but the vision before her. "Those that can't see their own land aren't Irish. Mongrels is the name for them, without pride of heart or light of understanding."

She was off.

With a far, fixed gaze and her mind in a state of internal combustion, she seemed a thousand miles away from Phyl and her affairs, fighting the battles of Ireland.

Phyl gathered the impression that, if she went to America Mrs. Hennessey would grieve less over the fact that she (Phyl) was leaving Merrion Square, than over the fact that she was leaving Dublin. She escaped, carrying this impression with her, went upstairs, dressed, and then started off for Mr. Hennessey's office.

It was a cold, bright day and Dublin looked almost cheerful in the sunlight.

The lawyer looked surprised when she was shown into his private room; then, when she had told him her business, he fumbled amongst the papers on his desk and produced a letter.

"This is from Pinckney," said he. "It came by the same post as yours, only it was directed to the office. It's the same story, too. He wants you to go over."

"I've been thinking over the whole business," said Phyl, "and I feel I ought to go."

"Aren't you happy in Dublin?" asked he.

"M'yes," answered the other. "But, you see—at least, I'm as happy as I suppose I'll be anywhere, only they are my people and I feel I ought to go to them. It's very lonely to have no people of one's own. You and Mrs. Hennessey have been very kind to me, and I shall always be grateful, but—"

"But we aren't your own flesh and blood. You're right. Well, there it is. We'll be sorry to lose you, but, maybe, though you haven't much experience of the world, you've hit the nail on the head. We aren't your flesh and blood, and though the Pinckneys aren't much more to you, still, one drop of blood makes all the difference in the world. Then again, you're a cut above us; we're quite simple people, but the Berknowles were always in the Castle set and a long chalk above the Hennesseys. I was saying that to Norah only last night when I was reading the account of the big party at the Viceregal Lodge and the names of all the people that were there, and I said to her, 'Phyl ought to be going to parties like that by and by when she grows older, and we can't do much for her in that way,' and off she goes in a temper. 'Who's the Aberdeens?' says she. 'A lot of English without an Irish feather in their tails, and he opening the doors to visitors in his dressing gown—Castle,' she says, 'it's little Castle there'll be when we have a Parliament sitting in Dublin.'"

"I don't want to go to parties at the Viceregal Lodge," said Phyl, flushing to think of what a snob she had been when only a few days back she had criticised the Hennesseys and their set in her own mind. These honest, straightforward good people were not snobs, whatever else they might be, and if her desire for America had been prompted solely by the desire to escape from the social conditions that environed her friends, she would now have smothered it and stamped on it. But the call from Charleston that had come across the water to her was an influence far more potent than that. That call from the country where her mother had been born and where her mother's people had always lived had more in it than the voices that carried the message.

"Well," said Hennessey, "you mayn't want to go to parties now, but you will when you are a bit older. However, you can please yourself—Do you want to go to America?"

"I do," said Phyl. "It's not that I want to leave you, but there is something that tells me I have got to go. When I read the letter first this morning, I was delighted to think that Mr. Pinckney was not still angry with me, and I liked the idea of the change, for Dublin is a bit dreary after Kilgobbin and—and well, I will say it—I don't care for some of the people I have met in Dublin. But since then a new feeling has come over me. I think it came as I was walking down here to the office. It's a feeling as if something were pulling me ever so slightly, yet still pulling me from over there. My father said that there was more of mother in me than him. I remember he said that once—well, perhaps it's that. She came from over there."

"Maybe it is," said Hennessey.



CHAPTER IX

The thing was settled definitely that night, Mrs. Hennessey resisting the idea at first, more, one might have fancied from her talk, because the idea was anti-national than from love of Phyl, though, as a matter of fact, she was fond enough of the girl.

"It's what's left Ireland what it is," went on the good lady. "Cripples and lunatics, that's all that's left of us with your emigration; all the good blood of Ireland flowing away from her and not a drop, scarcely, coming back."

"I'll come back," said Phyl, "you need not fear about that—some day."

"Ay, some day," said Mrs. Hennessey, and stared into the fire. Then the spirit moving her, she began to discant on things past and people vanished.

Synge, and Oscar Wilde and Willie Wilde, who was the real genius of the family, only his genius "stuck in him somehow and wouldn't come out." She passed from people who had vanished to places that had changed, and only stopped when the servant came in with the announcement that supper was ready.

Then at supper, lo and behold! she discussed the going away of Phyl, as though it were a matter arranged and done with and carrying her full consent and approval.

During the weeks following, Phyl's impending journey kept Mrs. Hennessey busy in a spasmodic way. One might have fancied from the preparations and lists of things necessary that the girl was off to the wilds of New Guinea or some region equally destitute of shops.

Hennessey remonstrated, and then let her have her way—it kept her quiet, and Phyl, nothing loath, spent most of her time now in shops, Tod and Burns, and Cannock and White's, examining patterns and being fitted, varying these amusements by farewell visits. She was invited out by all the Hennesseys' friends, the Farrels and the Rourkes, and the Longs and the Newlands, and the Pryces and the Oldhams, all prepared tea-parties in her honour, made her welcome, and made much of her, just as we make much of people who have not long to live.

She was the girl that was going to America. She did not appreciate the real kindness underlying this terrible round of festivities till she was standing on the deck of the Hybernia at Kingstown saying good-bye to Hennessey.

Then, as the boat drew away from the Carlisle pier, as it passed the guardship anchorage and the batteries at the ends of the east and west piers, all those people from whom she had longed to escape seemed to her the most desirable people on earth.

Bound for a world unknown, peopled with utter strangers, Ireland, beloved Ireland, called after her as a mother calls to her child.

Oh, the loneliness! the desolation!

As she stood watching the Wicklow mountains fading in the grey distance, she knew for the first time the meaning of those words, "Gone West"; and she knew what the thousands suffered who, driven from their cabins on the hillside or the moor, went West in the old days when the emigrant ship showed her tall masts in Queenstown Harbour and her bellying canvas to the sunset of the Atlantic.

At Liverpool, she found Mrs. Van Dusen, a tall, rather good-looking, rather hard-looking but exceedingly fashionable individual, at the hotel where it was arranged they should meet.

Phyl, looking like a lost dog, confused by travel and dumb from dejection, had little in common with this lady, nor did a rough passage across the Atlantic extend their knowledge of one another, for Mrs. Van Dusen scarcely appeared from her state-room till the evening when, the great ship coming to her moorings, New York sketched itself and its blazing skyscrapers against the gloom before the astonished eyes of Phyl.

PART II



CHAPTER I

Holyhead, Liverpool, New York, each of these stopping places had impressed upon Phyl the distance she was putting between herself and her home, making her feel that if this business was not death it was, at least, a very good imitation of dying.

But the south-bound express from New York was to show her just what people may be expected to feel after they are dead.

America had been for Phyl little more than a geographical expression. "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Settlers in Canada" and "Round the World in Eighty Days," had given her pictures, and from these she had built up a vague land of snow and forests, log huts, plains, Red Indians, runaway negroes and men with bowie knives.

New York had given this fantastic idea a rough joggle, the south-bound express tumbled it all to pieces.

Forests and mountains and plains would have been familiar to her imagination, but the south-bound express was producing for her inspection quite different things from these.

New Jersey with its populous towns, for instance, towns she never could have imagined or dreamed of, filled with people whose existence she could not picture.

What gave her a cold grue was the suddenly grasped fact that all this great mechanism of life, cities, towns, roaring railways, agricultural lands, manufacturing districts filled with English speaking people—that all this was alien, knew nothing of Ireland or England, except as it might know of Japan or a dream of the past.

The people in the train were talking English—were English to all intents and purposes, and yet, as far as England and Ireland were concerned, she knew them to be dead.

It had been freezing in New York, a great rainstorm was blowing across the world as they crossed the Delaware; it passed, sweeping away east under the arch of a vast rainbow, even the rainbow seemed alien and different to Irish rainbows—it was too big.

Then came Philadelphia, where some of the dead folk left the train and others got in. One had an Irish voice and accent. He was a big man with a hard, pushful face and a great under jaw. Phyl knew him at once for what he was, and that he had died to Ireland long years ago.

Then came Wilmington and Baltimore, and then, long after sunset in the dark, a warmer air that entered the train like a viewless passenger, nerve soothing and mind lulling—the first breath of the South.

Next morning, looking from the windows of the car, she saw the South. Vast spaces of low-lying land broken by river and bayou, flooded by the light of the new risen sun and touched by a vague mist from the sea, soft as a haze of summer, warm with light and everywhere hinting at the blue deep sky beyond.

Youth, morning, and the spirit of the sea all lay in that luminous haze, that warm light filled with the laziness of June; and, for one delightful moment, it seemed to Phyl that summer days long forgotten, rapturous mornings half remembered were here again.

The rumble of trestle and boom of bridge filled the train, and now the masts of ships showed thready against the hazy blue of the sky; frame houses sprang up by the track and fences with black children roosting on them; then the mean streets of the coloured quarter and now, as the cars slackened speed, came the bustle that marks the end of a journey. People were getting their light luggage together, and as Phyl was strapping the bundle that held her travelling rug and books, a waft of tepid, salt-scented air came through the compartment and on it the voice of the negro attendant rousing some drowsy passenger.

"Charleston, sah."

She got out, dazed and numbed by the journey, and stood with the rug bundle in her hand looking about her, half undecided what to do, half absorbed by the bustle and movement of the platform.

Then, pushing towards her through the crowd, she saw Pinckney.

He had come to meet her, and as they shook hands, Phyl laughed.

He seemed so bright and cheerful, and the relief at finding a friend after that long, friendless journey was so great that she laughed right out with pleasure, like a little child—laughed right into his eyes.

It seemed to Pinckney that he had never seen the real Phyl before.

He took the bundle from her and gave it to a negro servant, and then, giving the luggage checks to the servant and leaving him to bring on the luggage, he led the girl through the crowd.

"We'll walk to the house," said he, "if you are not too tired; it's only a few steps away—well—how do you like America?"

"America?" she replied. "I don't know—it's different from what I thought it would be, ever so much different—and this place—why, it is like summer here."

"It's the South," said Pinckney. "Look, this is Meeting Street."

They had turned from the street leading from the station into a broad, beautiful highway, placid, sun flooded, and leading away to the Battery, that chief pride and glory of Charleston.

On either side of the street, half hidden by their garden walls, large stately houses of the Georgian era showed themselves. Mansions that had slumbered in the sun for a hundred years, great, solid houses whose yellow-wash seemed the incrustation left by golden and peaceful afternoons, houses of old English solidity yet with the Southern touch of deep verandas and the hint of palm trees in their jealously walled gardens.

"Oh, how beautiful!" said Phyl. She stopped, looked about her, and then gazed away down the street. It was as though the old stately street—and surely the Street of Other Days might be its name—had been waiting for her all her life, waiting for her to turn that corner leading from the commonplace station, waiting to greet her like the ghost of some friend of childhood. Surely she knew it! Like the recollection of a dream once dreamed, it lay before her with its walled gardens, its vaguely familiar houses, its sunlight and placidity.

Pinckney, proud of his native town and pleased at this appreciation of it, stood by without speaking, watching the girl who seemed to have forgotten his existence for a moment. Her head was raised as if she were inhaling the sea wind lazily blowing from the Battery, and bearing with it stray scents from the gardens by the way.

Then she came back to herself, and they walked on.

"It's just as if I knew the place," said she, "and yet I never remember seeing anything like it before."

"I've felt that way sometimes about places," said Pinckney. "It seemed to me that I knew Paris quite well when I went there, though I'd never been there before. Charleston is pretty English, anyway, and maybe it's that that makes it seem familiar. But I'm glad you like it. You like it, don't you?"

"Like it!" said she. "I should think I did—It's more than liking—I love it."

He laughed.

"Better than Dublin?"

It was her turn to laugh.

"I never loved Dublin." She turned her head to glance at a peep of garden showing through a wrought iron gate. "Oh, Dublin!—don't talk to me about it here. I want to keep on feeling I'm here really and that there's nowhere else."

"There isn't," said he, disclosing for the first time in his life, and quite unconsciously, his passion for the place where he had been born. "There's nowhere else but Charleston worth anything—I don't know what it is about, but it's so."

They were passing a wall across whose top peeped an elbow of ivy geranium. It was as though the unseen garden beyond, tired of constraint and drowsily stretching, had disclosed this hint of a geranium coloured arm.

Pinckney paused at a wrought iron gate and opened it.

"This is Vernons," said he.



CHAPTER II

A grosbeak was singing in the magnolia tree by the gate and the warmth of the morning sun was filling the garden with a heart-snatching perfume of jessamine.

Jessamine and the faint bitterness of sun warmed foliage.

It was a garden sure to be haunted by birds; not large and, though well kept, not trim, and sing the birds as loud as they might, they never could break the charm of silence cast by Time on this magic spot.

In the centre of the lawn stood a dial, inscribed with the old dial motto:

The Hours Pass and are Numbered.

Phyl paused for a moment just as she had paused in the street, and Pinckney looking at her noticed again that uptilt of the head, and that far away look as of a person who is trying to remember or straining to hear.

Then a voice from the house came across the broad veranda leading from the garden to the lower rooms.

A female voice that seemed laughing and scolding at the same time.

"Dinah! Dinah! bless the girl, will she never learn sense— Dinah! Ah, there you are. How often have I told you to put General Grant in the sun first thing in the morning?— You've been dusting! I'll dust you. Here, get away."

Out on the veranda, parrot cage in hand, came a most surprising lady. Antique yet youthful, dressed as ladies were wont to dress of a morning in long forgotten years, bright eyed, and wrathfully agitated.

"Aunt," cried Pinckney. "Here we are."

The sun was in Miss Pinckney's eyes; she put the cage down, shaded her eyes and stared full at Phyl.

"God bless me!" said Miss Pinckney.

"This is Phyl," said he, as they came up to the verandah steps.

Miss Pinckney, seeming not to hear him in the least, took the girl by both hands, and holding her so as if for inspection stared at her.

Then she turned on Pinckney with a snap.

"Why didn't you tell me—she's—why, she's a Mascarene. Well, of all the astonishing things in the world— Child—child, where did you get that face?"

Before Phyl could answer this recondite question, she found herself enveloped in frills and a vague perfume of stephanotis. Maria Pinckney had taken her literally to her heart, and was kissing her as people kiss small children, kissing her and half crying at the same time, whilst Pinckney stood by wondering.

He thought that he knew everything about Maria Pinckney, just as he had fancied he knew himself till Phyl had shewn him, over there in Ireland, that there were a lot of things in his mind and character still to be known by himself. This, as regards him, seemed the special mission of Phyl in the world.

"It's the likeness," said Miss Pinckney. "I thought it was Juliet Mascarene there before me in the sun, Juliet dead those years and years." Then commanding herself, and with one of those reverses, sudden changes of manner and subject peculiar to herself:

"Where's your luggage?"

"Abraham is bringing it along."

"Abraham! Do you mean you didn't drive, walked here from the station?"

"Yes," said Pinckney shamefacedly, almost, and wondering what sin against the covenances he had committed now.

"And she after that journey from N'York. Richard Pinckney, you are a—man—I was going to have called you a fool—but it's the same thing. Here, come on both of you—the child must be starving. This is the breakfast room, Phyl—Phyl! I will never get used to that name; no matter, I'm getting an old woman, and mustn't grumble—mustn't grumble—umph!"

She took Pinckney's walking-stick from him and, with the end of it, picked up a duster that the mysterious Dinah, evidently, had left lying on the floor.

She put the duster out on the veranda, rang a bell and ordered the coloured boy who answered it to send in breakfast.

Phyl, commanded by Miss Pinckney, sat down to table just as she was without removing her hat.

The old lady had come to the conclusion that the newcomer must be faint with hunger after her journey, and when Miss Pinckney came to one of her conclusions, there was nothing more to be said on the matter.

It was a pleasant room, chintzy and sunny; they sat down to a gate-legged table that would just manage to seat four comfortably whilst the urn was brought in, a copper urn in which the water was kept at boiling point by a red hot iron contained in a cylinder.

Phyl knew that urn. They had one like it at Kilgobbin and she said so, but Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear her. There were times when this lady was almost rude—or seemed so owing to inattention, her bustling mind often outrunning the conversation or harking back to the past when it ought to have been in the present.

Tea making, and the making of tea was a solemn rite at Vernons, absorbed her whole attention, but Pinckney noticed this morning that the hand, that old, perfect, delicately shaped hand, trembled ever so slightly as it measured the tea from the tortoise-shell covered tea caddy, and that the thin lips, lips whose thinness seemed only the result of the kisses of Time, were moving as though debating some question unheard.

He recognised that the coming of Phyl had produced a great effect on Maria Pinckney. No one knew her better than he, for no one loved her so well.

It was she who ordered him about, still, just as though he were a small boy, and sometimes as he sat watching her, so fragile, so indomitable, like the breath of winter would come the thought that a day would come—a day might come soon when he would be no longer ordered about, told to put his hat in the hall—which is the proper place for hats—told not to dare to bring cigars into the drawing-room.

To Phyl, Maria Pinckney formed part of the spell that was surrounding her; Meeting Street had begun the weaving of this spell, Vernons was completing it with the aid of Maria Pinckney.

The song of the Cardinal Grosbeak in the garden, the stirring of the window curtains in the warm morning air, the feel of morning and sunlight, the scent of the tea that was filling the room, the room itself old-fashioned yet cheerful, chintzy and sunny, all the things had the faint familiarity of the street. It was as though the blood of her mother's people coursing in her veins had retained and brought to her some thrill and warmth from all these things; these things they knew and loved so well.

"There's the carriage," said Miss Pinckney, whose ears had picked out the sound of it drawing up at the front door. "They know where to take the luggage. Richard, go and see that they don't knock the bannisters about. Abraham is all thumbs and has no more sense in moving things than Dinah has'n dusting them. Only last week when Mrs. Beamis was going away, he let that trunk of hers slip and I declare to goodness I thought it was a church falling down the stairs and tearing the place to pieces."

There was little of the stately languor of the South in Miss Pinckney's speech. She was Northern on the mother's side. But in her prejudices she was purely Southern, or, at least, Charlestonian.

Pinckney laughed.

"I don't think Phyl's luggage will hurt much even if it falls," said he. "English luggage is generally soft."

"It's only a trunk and a portmanteau," said Phyl, as he left the room, but Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear; pouring herself out another cup of tea (she was the best and the worst hostess in the whole world) and seeming not to notice that Phyl's cup was empty, she was off on one of her mind wandering expeditions, a state of soul that sometimes carried her into the past, sometimes into the future, that led her anywhere and to the wrapt, inward contemplation of all sorts of things and subjects from the doings of the Heavenly Host to the misdoings of Dinah.

She talked on these expeditions.

"Well, I'm sure and I'm sure I don't know what folk want with the luggage they carry about with them nowadays— The old folk didn't. Not Saratoga trunks, anyhow. I remember 'swell as if it was yesterday way back in 1880, when Richard's father and mother were married, old Simon Mascarene—he belonged to your mother's lot, the Mascarenes of Virginia— He came to the wedding, and all he brought was a carpet-bag. I can see the roses on it still. He wore a beaver hat. They'd been out of fashion for years and years. So was he. Twenty dollars apiece they cost him, and his clothes were the same. Looked like a picture out of Dickens. Your grandmother was there, too, came from Richmond for the wedding, drove here in her own carriage. She and Simon were the last of the Virginia Mascarenes and they looked it. Seems to me some people never can be new nor get away from their ancestors. If you'd dressed Simon in kilts it wouldn't have made any difference, much, he'd still have been Simon Mascarene of Virginia, just as stiff and fine and proud and old-fashioned."

"It seems funny that my people should have been the Virginia Mascarenes," said Phyl, "because—because—well, I feel as if my people had always lived here—this feels like home—I don't know what it is, but just as I came into the street outside there I seemed to know it, and this house—"

"Why, God bless my soul," said Miss Pinckney, whose eyes had just fallen on the girl's empty cup, "here have I been talking and talking, and you waiting for some more tea. Why didn't you ask, child?—What were you saying? The Virginia Mascarenes— Oh, they often came here, and your mother knew this house as well as Planters. That was the name of their house in Richmond. But what I can't get over is your likeness to Juliet. She might have been your sister to look at you both—and she dead all these years."

"Who was Juliet?"

"She was the girl who died," said Miss Pinckney. "You know, although Richard calls me Aunt, I am not really his aunt; it's just an easy name for an old woman who is an interloper, a Pinckney adrift. It was this way I came in. Long before the Civil War, the Pinckneys lived at a house called Bures in Legare Street. A fine old house it was, and is still. Well, I was a cousin with a little money of my own, and I was left lonely and they took me in. James Pinckney was head of the family then, and he had two sons, Rupert and Charles. I might have been their sister the way we all lived together and loved each other—and quarrelled. Dear me, dear me, what is Time at all that it leaves everything the same? The same sun, and flowers and houses, and all the people gone or changed— Well, I am trying to tell you— Rupert fell in love with Juliet Mascarene, who lived here. He was killed suddenly in '61— I don't want to talk of it—and she died of grief the year after. She died of grief—simply died of grief. Charles lived and married in 1880 when he was forty years old. He married Juliet's brother's daughter and Vernons came to him on the marriage. He hadn't a son till ten years later. That son was Richard. Charles left Richard all his property and Vernons on the condition that I always lived here—till I died, and that's how it is. I'm not Richard's aunt, it's only a name he gives me—I'm only just an old piece of furniture left with the house to him. I'm so fond of the place, it would kill me to leave it; places grow like that round one, though I'm sure I don't know why."

"I don't wonder at you loving Vernons," said Phyl. "I was just the same about our place in Ireland, Kilgobbin—I thought it would kill me to leave it."

"Tell me about it," said Miss Pinckney. Phyl told, or tried to tell.

Looking back, she found between herself and Ireland the sunlight of Charleston, the garden with the magnolia trees where the red bird was singing and the jessamine casting its perfume. Ireland looked very far away and gloomy, desolate as Kilgobbin without its master and with the mist of winter among the trees.

All that was part of the Past gone forever, and so great was the magic of this new place that she found herself recognising with a little chill that this Past had separated itself from her, that her feeling towards it was faintly tinged by something not unlike indifference.

"Well," said Miss Pinckney, when she had finished, "it must be a beautiful old place, though I can't seem to see it— You see, I've never been in Ireland and I can't picture it any more than the new Jerusalem. Now Dinah knows all about the new Jerusalem, from the golden slippers right up she sees it—I can't. Haven't got the gift of seeing things, and it seems strange that the A'mighty should shower it on a coloured girl and leave a white woman wanting; but it appears to be the A'mighty knows his own business, so I don't grumble. Now I'm going to show you the house and your room. I've given you a room looking right on the garden, this side. You've noticed how all our houses here are built with their sides facing the street and their fronts facing the garden, or maybe you haven't noticed it yet, but you will. 'Pears to me our ancestors had some sense in their heads, even though they didn't invent telegraphs to send bad news in a hurry and railway cars to smash people to bits, and telephones to let strangers talk right into one's house just by ringing a bell. Not that I'd let one into Vernons. You may hunt high or low, garret or basement, you won't find one of those boxes of impudence in Vernons—not while I have servants to go my messages."

Miss Pinckney was right. For years she had fought the telephone and kept it out, making Richard Pinckney's life a tissue of small inconveniences, and suffering this epitaph on her sanity to be written by all sorts of inferior people, "Plumb crazy."

She led the way from the breakfast-room and passed into the hall.

The spirit of Vernons inhabited the hall. One might have fancied it as a stout and prosperous gentleman attired in a blue coat with brass buttons, shorts, and wearing a bunch of seals at his fob. Oak, brought from England, formed the panelling, and a great old grandfather's clock, with the maker's name and address, "Whewel. Coggershall," blazoned on its brass face, told the time, just as it had told the time when the Regent was ruling at St. James's in those days which seem so spacious, yet so trivial in their pomp and vanity.

Sitting alone here of an afternoon with the sun pointing fingers through the high leaded windows, Whewel of Coggershall took you under his spell, the spell of old ghosts of long forgotten afternoons, spacious afternoons filled with the cawing of rooks and the drone of bees. English afternoons of the good old time when the dust of the post chaise was the only mark of hurry across miles of meadow land and cowslip weather. And then as you sat held by the sound of the slow-slipping seconds, maybe, from some door leading to the servants' quarters suddenly left open a voice would come, the voice of some darky singing whilst at work.

A snatch of the South mixing with your dream of England and the past, and making of the whole a charm beyond words.

That is Charleston.

Set against the panelling and almost covering it in parts were prints, wood-cuts, engravings, portraits in black and white.

Here was a silhouette of Colonel Vernon, the founder of the house, and another of his wife. Here was an early portrait of Jeff Davis, hollow-cheeked and goatee-bearded, and here was Mayflower, the property of Colonel Seth Mascarene, the fastest trotting horse in Virginia, worshipped by her owner whose portrait hung alongside.

Phyl glanced at these pictures as she followed Miss Pinckney, who opened doors shewing the dining-room, a room rather heavily furnished, hung with portraits of long-faced gentlemen and ladies of old time, and then the drawing-room. A real drawing-room of the Sixties, a thing preserved in its entirety, in all its original stiffness, interesting as a valentine, perfumed like an old rosewood cabinet.

Keepsakes and Books of Beauty lay on the centre table, a gilt clock beneath a glass shade marked the moment when it had ceased to keep time over twenty-five years ago, the antimacassars on the armchairs were not a line out of position; not a speck of dust lay anywhere, and the Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses simpered and made love in the same old fashion, preserving unaltered the sentiment of spring, the suggestion of Love, lambs, and the song of birds.

"It's just as it used to be," said Miss Pinckney. "Nothing at all has been changed, and I dust it myself. I would just as soon let a servant loose here with a duster as I'd let one of the buzzards from the market-place loose in the larder. Those water-colours were done by Mary Mascarene, Juliet's sister, who died when she was fifteen; they mayn't be masterpieces but they're Mary's, and worth more'n if they were covered with gold. Mrs. Beamis sniffed when she came in here—she's the woman whose trunk got loose on the stairs I told you about—sniffed as if the place smelt musty. She's got a husband who's made a million dollars out of dry goods in Chicago, and she thought the room wanted re-furnishing. Didn't say it, but I knew. A player-piano is what she wanted. Didn't say it, but I knew. Umph!"

Miss Pinckney, having shown Phyl out, looked round the room as if to make sure that all the familiar ghosts were in their places, then she shut the door with a snap, and turning, led the way upstairs murmuring to herself, and with the exalted and far away look which she wore when put out.

Phyl's room lay on the first landing, a bright and cheerful room papered with a rather cheap flower and sprig patterned paper, spring-like for all its cheapness, and just the background for children's heads when they wake up on a bright morning.

A bowl of flowers stood on the dressing-table, and the open window shewed across the verandah a bit of the garden, where the cherokee roses were blooming.

"This is your room," said Miss Pinckney. "It's one of the brightest in the house, and I hope you'll like it— Listen!"

Through the open window came the chime of church-bells.

"It's the chimes of St. Michael's. You'll never want a clock here, the bells ring every quarter, just as they've rung for the last hundred years; they're the first thing I remember, and maybe they'll be the last. Well, come on and I'll show you some more of the house, if you're not tired and don't want to rest."

She led the way from the room and along the corridor, opening doors and shewing rooms, and then up a back stairs to the top floor beneath the attics.

The house seemed to grow in age as they ascended. Not a door in Vernons was exactly true in line; the old house settling itself down quietly through the years and assisted perhaps by the great earthquake, though that had left it practically unharmed, shewed that deviation from the right line in cornice and wainscoting and door space, which is the hall mark left on architecture by genius or age. The builders of the Parthenon knew this, the builders of Vernons did not— Age supplied their defects.

Up here the flooring of the passages and rooms frankly sagged in places, and the beams bellied downwards ever so little and the ceilings bowed.

"I've seen all these bed-rooms filled in the old days," said Miss Pinckney. "We had wounded soldiers here in the war. What Vernons hasn't seen of American history isn't worth telling—much. Here's the nursery."

She opened a door with bottle-glass panels, real old bottle-glass worth its weight in minted silver, and shewed Phyl into a room.

"This is the nursery," said she.

It was a large room with two windows, and the windows were barred to keep small people from tumbling into the garden. The place had the air of silence and secrecy that haunts rooms long closed and deserted. An old-fashioned paper shewing birds of Paradise covered the walls. A paper so old that Miss Pinckney remembered it when, as a child, she had come here to tea with the Mascarene children, so good that the dye of the gorgeous Paradise birds had scarcely faded.

A beam of morning sun struck across the room, a great solid, golden bar of light. Phyl, as she stood for a moment on the threshold, saw motes dancing in the bar of light; the air was close and almost stuffy owing to the windows being shut. A rocking-horse, much, much the worse for wear stood in one corner, he was piebald and the beam of light just failed to touch his brush-like tail. A Noah's Ark of the good old pattern stood on the lid of a great chest under one of the windows, and in the centre of the room a heavy table of plain oak nicked by knives and stained with ink told its tale.

There were books in a little hanging book-case, books of the 'forties' and 'fifties': "Peter Parley," "The Child's Pilgrim's Progress," "The Dairy-Maid's Daughter," an odd volume of Harper's Magazine containing an instalment of "Little Dorrit," Caroline Chesebro's "Children of Light," and Samuel Irenaeus Prime's "Elizabeth Thornton or the Flower and Fruit of Female Piety, and other Sketches." Miss Pinckney opened one of the windows to let in air; Phyl, who had said nothing, stood looking about her at the forsaken toys, the chairs, and the little three-legged stool most evidently once the property of some child.

All nurseries have a generic likeness. It seemed to her that she knew this room, from the beam of light with the motes dancing in it to the bird-patterned paper. Kilgobbin nursery was papered with a paper giving an endless repetition of one subject—a man driving a pig to market—with that exception, the two rooms were not unlike. Yet those birds were the haunting charm of this place, the things that most appealed to her, things that seemed the ghosts of old friends.

She came to the window and looked out through the bars. Across the garden of Vernons one caught a glimpse of other gardens, palmetto-tree tops, and away, beyond the battery, a hint of the blue harbour. Just the picture to fill an imaginative child's mind with all sorts of pleasant fancies about the world, and Phyl, forgetting for a moment Miss Pinckney, herself, and the room in which she was, stood looking out, caught in a momentary day dream, just like a child in one of those reveries that are part of the fairy tale of childhood.

That touch of blue sea beyond the red roofs and green palmetto fronds gave her mind wings for a moment and a world to fly through. Not the world we live in, but the world worth living in. Old sailor-stories, old scraps of thought and dreams from nowhere pursued her, haunted her during that delightful and tantalising moment, and then she was herself again and Miss Pinckney was saying:

"It's a pretty view and hasn't changed since I was a child. Now, in N'York they'd have put up skyscrapers; Lord bless you, they'd have put them up at a loss so's to seem energetic and spoil the view. That's a N'Yorker in two words, happy so long as he's energetic and spoiling views—" Then gazing dreamily towards the touch of blue sea. "Well, I guess the Lord made N'Yorkers same as he made you and me. His ways are inscrutable and past finding out; so'r the ways of some of his creatures."

She turned from the window, and her eye fell on the great chest by the other window.

Going to it, she opened the lid.

It was full of old toys, mostly broken. She seemed to have forgotten the presence of Phyl. Holding the chest's lid open, she gazed at the coloured and futile contents.

Then she closed the lid of the chest with a sigh.



CHAPTER III

The South dines at four o'clock—at least Charleston does.

It was the old English custom and the old Irish custom, too.

In the reign of William the Conqueror people dined at eleven A.M. or was it ten? Then, as civilisation advanced, the dinner hour stole forward. In the time of the Georges it reached four o'clock. In Ireland, the most conservative country on earth, some people even still sit down to table at four—in Charleston every one does.

One would not change the custom for worlds, just as one would not change the old box pews of St. Michael's or replace the cannon on the Battery with modern ordinance.

Richard Pinckney did not dine at home that day. He was dining with the Rhetts in Calhoun Street, so Miss Pinckney said as they sat down to table. She sniffed as she said it, for the Rhetts, though one of the best families in the town, were people not of her way of thinking. The two Rhett girls had each a motor-car of her own and drove it—abomination!

The automobile ranked in her mind with the telephone as an invention of the devil.

Phyl had not seen Richard Pinckney since the morning and now he was dining out. Her heart had warmed to him at the station on the way to Vernons, and at breakfast he had appeared to her as a quite different person to the Richard Pinckney who had come to Kilgobbin, more boyish and frank, less of a man of the world. She had not seen him since he left the room at breakfast-time to look after her luggage. Miss Pinckney said he had gone off "somewhere or another" and grumbled at him for going off leaving his breakfast not quite finished, she said that he was always "scatter braining about" either at the yacht club or somewhere else.

Phyl, as she sat now at the dining-table with the dead and gone Mascarene men and women looking at her from the canvases on the wall, felt ever so slightly hurt.

Youth calls to youth irrespective of sex. She felt as a young person feels when another young person shows indifference. Then came the thought: was he avoiding her? Was he angry still about the affair at Kilgobbin, or was it just that he did not want to be bothered talking to her, looked on her as a nuisance in the house, a guest of no interest to him and yet to whom he had to be polite?

She could not tell. Neither could she tell why the problem exercised her mind in the way it did. Even at Kilgobbin, despite the fact of her antagonism towards him, Pinckney had possessed the power of disturbing her mind and making her think about him in a way that no one else had ever succeeded in doing. No one else had made her feel the short-comings in the household menage at Kilgobbin, no one else had made her so fiercely critical of herself and her belongings.

She did not recognise the fact, but the fact was there, that it was a necessity of her being to stand well in this man's eyes.

When a woman falls in love with a man or a man with a woman, the first necessity of his or her being is to stand well in the eyes of the loved one, anything that may bring ridicule or adverse criticism or disdain is death.

Phyl was not in love with Richard Pinckney, nor had she been in love with him at Kilgobbin, all the same the sensitiveness to appearances felt by a lover was there. Her anger that night when he had let her in at eleven o'clock was due, perhaps, less to his implied reproof then the fact that she had felt cheap in his eyes, and now, sitting at dinner with Miss Pinckney the idea that he was still angry with her was obscured by the far more distasteful idea that she was of absolutely no account in his eyes, a creature to whom he had to be civil, an interloper.

Her cheeks flushed and her eyes brightened at the thought, but Miss Pinckney did not notice it. She had turned from the subject of the Rhetts and their automobiles to Charleston society in general.

"Now that you've come," said she, "you will find there's not a moment you won't enjoy yourself if you're fond of gadding about. All the society here is in the hands of young people, balls and parties! The St. Cecilias give three balls a year. I go always, not to dance but to look on. Richard is a St. Cecilia—St. Cecilias? Why, it's just a club a hundred-and-forty years old. There are two hundred of them, all men, and they know how to entertain. I have been at every ball for the last half century. Not one have I missed. Then there's the yacht club and picnics to Summerville and the Isle of Palms, and bathing parties and boating by moonlight. If you are a gad-about you will enjoy all that."

"But I'm not," said Phyl. "I've never been used to society, much. I like books better than people, unless they're—"

"Unless they're what?"

"Well—people I really like."

"Well," said Miss Pinckney, "one wouldn't expect you to like people you didn't like—there's no 'really' in liking, it's one thing or the other—you don't care for girls, maybe?"

"I haven't seen much of them," replied Phyl, "except at school, and that was only for a short time. I—I ran away."

"Ran away! And why did you run away?"

"I was miserable; they were kind enough to me, but I wanted to get home—Father was alive then—I felt I had to get home or die—I can't explain it—It felt like a sort of madness. I had to get back home."

Miss Pinckney was watching the girl, she scarcely seemed listening to her—Then she spoke:

"Impulsive. If I wasn't sitting here in broad daylight, I'd fancy it was Juliet Mascarene. What makes you so like her? It's not the face so much, though the family likeness runs strong, still, the face is different, though like—It's just you yourself—well, I'm sure I don't know, seems to me there's a lot of things hid from us. Look at the Pringles, Anthony's family, the ones that live in Tradd Street. If you put their noses together, they'd reach to Legare Street. It runs in the family. Julian Pringle, he died in '70, he was just the same. Now why should a long nose run through a family like that, or a bad temper, or the colour of hair? I don't know. The world's a puzzle and the older one grows, the more it puzzles one."

After dinner, Miss Pinckney ordered Phyl to put on her hat and they started out for a drive.

Every day at five o'clock, weather permitting, Miss Pinckney took an airing. She was one of the sights of Charleston, she, and the dark chestnut horses driven by Abraham the coloured coachman, and the barouche in which she drove; a carriage of other times, one of those deathless conveyances turned out in Long Acre in the days when varnish was varnish and hand labour had not been ousted by machinery. It was painted in a basket-work pattern, the pattern peculiar to the English Royal carriages, and the whole turn-out had an excellence and a style of its own—a thing unpurchasable as yesterday.

They drove in the direction of the Battery and here they drew up to look at the view. On one side of them stood the great curving row of mansions facing the sea, old Georgian houses and houses more modern, yet without offence, set in gardens where the palmetto leaves shivered in the sea wind and the pink mimosa mixed its perfume with the salt-scented air. On the other side lay the sea. Afternoon, late afternoon, is the time of all times to visit this spacious and sunlit place. It is then that the old ghosts return, if ever they return, to discuss the news brought by the last packet from England, the doings of Mr. Pitt, the Paris fashions.

Looking seaward they would see no change in the changeless sea and little change in the city if they turned their eyes that way.

Miss Pinckney got out and they walked a bit, inspecting the guns, each with its brass plate and its story.

Far away in the haze stood Fort Sumter,—a fragment of history, a sea warrior of the past, voiceless and guarding forever the viewless. It may have been some recollection of the Brighton front and of the great harbour of Kingstown with the sun upon it, and all this seemed vaguely familiar to Phyl, pleasantly familiar and homely. She breathed the sea air deeply and then, as she turned, glancing towards the land, a recollection came to her of the story she had been reading that evening in the library at Kilgobbin—"The Gold Bug." It was near here that Legrand had found the treasure. He had come to Charleston to buy the mattocks and picks—no, it was Jupp the negro who had come to buy them.

She turned to Miss Pinckney.

"Did you ever read a story called 'The Gold Bug' by Edgar Allan Poe?" she asked. "It is about a place near here—Sullivan's Island—that's it—I remember now."

"Why, I knew him," said Miss Pinckney.

"Knew Edgar Allan Poe!" said Phyl.

"I knew him when I was a child and I have sat on his knee and I can see his face—what a face it was! and the coat he wore—it had a velvet collar—his teeth were beautiful, and his hair—beautiful glossy hair it was, but he was not handsome as people use that expression, he was extraordinary, such eyes—and the most wonderful voice in the world. I'm seventy-five years of age and he died in October '49, and I met him three years before he died, so you see I was a pretty small child. It was at Fordham. He'd just taken a cottage there for his wife, who was ailing with consumption, and my aunt, Mary Pinckney, who was a friend of the Osgoods, took me there. It must have been summer for I remember a bird hanging in a cage in the sunshine, a bob-o'-link it was, he had caught it in the woods.

"Dear Lord! I wonder where that summer day's gone to, and the bob-o'-link—'pears to me we aren't even memories, for memories live and we don't."

They were walking along, Abraham slowly following with the carriage, and Miss Pinckney was walking in an exultant manner as though she saw nothing about her, as though she were treading air. Phyl had unconsciously set free a train of thought in the mind of Miss Pinckney, a train that always led to an explosion, and this is exactly how it happened and what she said.

"But his memory will live. Look right round you, do you see his statue?"

"No," said Phyl, sweeping the view. "Where is it?"

"Just so, where is it? It's not here, it's not in N'York, it's not in Baltimore, it's not in Philadelphia, it's not in Boston. The one real splendid writing man that America has produced she's ashamed to put up a statue to. Why? Because he drank! Why, God bless my soul, Grant drank. No, it wasn't drink, it was Griswold. The man who hated him, the man who crucified his reputation and sold the remains for thirty pieces of silver to a publisher, Griswold, Rufus Griswold—Judas Griswold that was his real name, and he hid it—"

Miss Pinckney had lowered her parasol in her anger, she shut it with a snap and then shot it up again; as she did so an automobile driven by a girl and which was approaching them, passed, and a young man seated by the girl raised his hat.

It was Richard Pinckney.

The girl was a very pretty brunette. This thing was too much for Miss Pinckney in her present temper; all her anger against Griswold seemed suddenly diverted to the automobile. She snorted.

"There goes Richard with Venetia Frances Rhett," said she. "Ought to be ashamed of herself driving along the Battery in that outrageous thing; goodness knows, they're bad enough driven by men, scaring people to death and killing dogs and chickens, without girls taking to them—"

She stared after the car, then signalling to Abraham, she got into the barouche, Phyl followed her and they continued their drive.

That evening after supper Miss Pinckney's mind warmed to thoughts of the good old days when motor-cars were undreamed of, and stirred up by the recollection of Edgar Allan Poe, discharged itself of reminiscences worth much gold could they have been taken down by a stenographer.

She was sitting with Phyl in the piazza, for the night was warm, and whilst a big southern moon lit the garden, she let her mind stray over the men and women who had made American literature in the '50's and '60's, many of whom she had known when young.

Estelle Anna Lewis of Baltimore, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Cornelius Mathews, Frances Sargent Osgood, N. P. Willis, Laughton Osborn. She had known Lowell and Longfellow, yet her mind seemed to cling mostly to the lesser people, writers in the Southern Literary Messenger, the Home Journal, the Mirror and the Broadway Journal.

People well-known in their day and now scarcely remembered, yet whose very names are capable of evoking the colour and romance of that fascinating epoch beyond and around the Civil War.

"They're all dead and gone," said she, "and folk nowadays don't seem to trouble about the best of them, or remember their lines, yet there's nothing they write now that's as good—I remember poor Thomas Ward. 'Flaccus' was the name he wrote under, a thin skeleton of a man always with his head in the air and his mind somewhere else, used to write in the Knickerbocker Journal; I heard him recite one of his things.

"'And, straining, fastened on her lips a kiss, That seemed to suck the life blood from her heart.'

"That stuck in my head, mostly, I expect, because Thomas Ward didn't look as if he'd ever kissed a girl, but they are good lines and a lot better than they write nowadays."

The wind had risen a bit and was stirring in the leaves of the magnolias, white carnations growing near the sun dial shook their ruffles in the moonlight, and from near and far away came the sounds of Charleston, voices, the sound of traffic and then, a thread of tune tying moonbeams, magnolias, carnations and cherokee roses in a great southern bunch, came the notes of a banjo, plunk, plunk, and a voice from somewhere away in the back premises, the voice of a negro singing one of the old Plantation songs.

Just a snatch before some closing door cut the singer off, but enough to make Phyl raise her head and listen, listen as though a whole world vaguely guessed, a world forgotten yet still warm and loving, youthful and sunlit, were striving to reach her and speak to her—As though Charleston the mysterious city that had greeted her first in Meeting Street were trying to tell her of things delightful, once loved, once known and forever vanished.

As she lay awake that night with the moonlight showing through the blinds, the whole of that strange day came before her in pictures: the face of Frances Rhett troubled her, yet she did not know in the least why; it seemed part of the horribleness of automobiles and the anger of Miss Pinckney and the tribulations of Edgar Allan Poe.

Then the fantastic band of forgotten literati trooped before her, led by "Flaccus," the man who didn't look as if he had ever kissed a girl, yet who wrote:

"And, straining, fastened on her lips a kiss, That seemed to suck the life blood from her heart."



CHAPTER IV

Phyl awoke to the early morning sunlight and the sounds of Charleston.

The chimes of St. Michael's were striking six and through the summery sunlit air carried by the sea wind stirring the curtains came the cries of the streets and the rumbling of early morning carts.

Oh, those negro cries! the cry of the crab-seller, the orange vendor, the man who sells "monkey meat" dolorous, long drawn out, lazy, you do not know the South till you have heard them.

The sound of a mat being shaken and beaten on the piazza, adjoining that on which her window opened came now, and two voices in dispute.

"Mistress Pinckney she told me to tell you—she mos' sholey did."

"Go wash yo' face, yo' coloured trash, cummin' here wid yo' orders—skip out o' my piazza—'clar' to goodness I dunno what's cummin' to niggers dese days."

Then Miss Pinckney's voice as from an upper window:

"Dinah! Seth! what's that I hear? Get on with your work the pair of you and stop your chattering. You hear me?"

When Phyl came down Richard Pinckney was in the garden smoking a cigarette and gathering some carnations.

"They're for aunt," said he, "to propitiate her for my being late last night. I wasn't in till one. I'm worse even than you, you see, and the next time you are out till eleven and I let you in and grumble at you, you can hit back. Have a flower."

He gave her the finest in his bunch and Phyl put it in her belt. If she had any doubt as to the sincerity of his welcome his manner this morning ought to have set her mind at rest.

She stood looking at him as he tied the stalks of the flowers together and he was worth looking at, a fresh, bright figure, the very incarnation of youth and health and one might almost say innocence. Clear eyed, well-groomed, good to look upon.

"I generally pick a flower and put it on her plate," said he, "but this morning she shall have a whole bunch—hope you slept all right?"

"Rather," said Phyl, "I never sleep much the first night in a new place—but somehow—oh, I don't know how to express it—but nothing here seems new."

"Nothing is," said he laughing, "it's all as old as the hills—you like it, don't you?"

"It's not a question of liking—of course I like it, who could help liking it—it's more than that. It's a feeling I have that I will either love it or hate it, and I don't know which yet, all sorts of things come back to me here, you see, my mother knew the place—do people remember what their mothers and fathers knew, I wonder? But, if you understood me, it's not so much remembering as feeling. All yesterday it seemed to me that I had only to turn some corner and come upon something waiting for me, something I knew quite well, and the smells and sounds and things are always reminding me of something—you know how it is when you have forgotten a name and when it's lying just at the back of your mind—that's how I feel here, about nearly everything—strange, isn't it?"

"Oh, I don't know," said the practical Pinckney. "This place is awfully English for one thing, sure to remind you of a lot of things in Ireland and England, and then there's of course the fact that you are partly American, but I don't see why you should ever hate it."

"Indeed, I didn't mean that," said she flushing up at the thought that in trying to express herself she had made such a blunder. "I meant—I meant, that this something about the place that is always reminding me of itself might make me hate it."

"Or love it?"

"Yes, but I can't explain—the place itself no one could hate, you must have thought me rude."

"Not a bit—not the least little bit in the world. Well, I believe you'll come to love it, not hate it."

"It," said Phyl. "I don't know that, because I don't know what it is—this something that is always peeping round corners at me yet hiding itself."

"Richard!" came Miss Pinckney's voice from the piazza where she had just appeared, "smoking cigarettes before breakfast, how often have I told you I won't have you smoking before breakfast—why, God bless my soul, what are you doing with all those carnations?"

He flung the cigarette-end away, but she refused to kiss him on account of the tobacco fumes, though she took the flowers.

Cigarettes, like telephones, automobiles, and the memory of Edgar Allan Poe, formed a subject upon which once started Miss Pinckney was hard to check, and whilst she poured out the tea, she pursued it.

"Dr. Cotton it was who told me, the one who used to live in Tradd Street, he was a relative of Dr. Garden the man that gave his name to that flower they call the gardenia—had it sent him from somewhere in the South, but I'm sure I don't know where—New Orleans, I think, but it doesn't matter. I was saying about Dr. Cotton, old Dr. Cotton of Tradd Street, he told me that the truth about young William Pringle's death was that he was black when he died, from cigarette smoking, black as a crow. Used to smoke before breakfast, used to smoke all day, used to smoke in his sleep, I b'lieve. Couldn't get rid of the pesky habit and died clinging to it, black as a crow. I can't abide the things. Your father used to smoke Bull Durham in a corn cob, or a cigar, he'd a' soon have smoked one of those cigarettes of yours as soon as he'd have been caught doing tatting. Don't tell me, there's no manhood in them, it's just vice in thimble-fulls. I'd much sooner see a man lying healthily under the table once in a way than always half fuddled, and I'd sooner be poisoned out by a green cigar now and then, than always having that nasty sickly cigarette smell round the place."

"But good gracious, Aunt, I'm not a cigarette smoker, only once and away and at odd times."

"I wasn't talking about you so much as the young men of to-day, and the young women, they're the worst, for they encourage the others to make fools of themselves, and if they're not smoking themselves they're sucking candy. Candy sucking and cigarette smoking is the ruin of the States. Those Rhett girls live on candy, and they look it—pasty faces."

"Why!" said he, "what grudge have you got against the Rhetts now, Aunt—it's as bad to take a girl's complexion away as a man's character—what have the Rhetts been doing to you?"

Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear the question for a moment, then she said, speaking as if to some invisible person:

"That Frances Rhett may be reckoned the belle of Charleston, that's what I heard old Mr. Outhwaite call her, but she's a belle I wouldn't care to have tied round my neck. Belle! She's no more a belle than I am, there are hundreds of prettier girls between here and the Battery, but she's one of those sort that have the knack of setting young men against each other and making them fight for her; she's labelled herself as a prize, which she isn't. I declare to goodness the world frightens me at times, the way I see fools going about labelled as clever men, and women your grandfathers wouldn't have cast an eye at going about labelled as beauties. I do believe if I was to give myself out as a beauty to-morrow I'd have half the young idiots in Charleston after me, believing me."

"They're after you already," said Pinckney, "only yesterday I heard young Reggy Calhoun saying—"

"I know," said Miss Pinckney, "and I want no more of your impudence. Now take yourself off if you've finished your breakfast, for Phyl and I have work to do."

He got up and went off laughing by way of the piazza and they could hear his cheery voice in the garden talking to the old negro gardener.

Miss Pinckney's eyes softened. She was fiddling with a spoon and when she spoke she seemed speaking to it, turning it about as if to examine its pattern all the time.

"I don't know what mothers with boys feel like, but I do want to see that boy safe and married before I go. He's just the sort to be landed in unhappiness; he is, most surely; well, I don't know, there's no use in warning young folk, you may spank 'em for stealing the jam but you can't spank 'em from fooling with the wrong sort of girl."

Miss Pinckney had talked the night before of Phyl's father and had proposed taking her this morning to the Magnolia cemetery to see the grave. She broke off the conversation suddenly as this fact strayed into her mind, and, rising up, invited Phyl to follow her to the kitchen premises where she had orders to give before starting.

"I always look after my own house," said she, "and always will. Fine ladies nowadays sit in their drawing-rooms and ring their bells for the servants to rob them and they aren't any more respected. That's what makes the Charleston negro the impudentest lump of blackness under the sun, that and knowing they're emancipated. They've got to look on themselves as part of the Heavenly Host. Well, I'll have no emancipated rubbish in my house, and the consequence is I never lose a servant and I never get impudence. They'll all get a pension when they're too old to work, and good food and good pay whilst they're working, and I've said to them 'you're no more emancipated than I am, we're all slaves to our duty and the only difference between now and the old days is I can't sell you—and if you were idle enough to make me want to sell you there's no one would buy such rubbish nowadays.' Half the trouble is that people these times don't know how to talk to coloured folk, and the other half is that they don't want to talk to them."

She led the way down passages to the great kitchen, stonebuilt, clean and full of sunlight. The door was open on to the yard and through an open side door one could get a glimpse of the scullery, the great washing up sink, generations old, and worn with use, and above it the drying dresser.

There were no new-fangled cooking inventions at Vernons, everything was done at an open range of the good old fashion still to be found in many an English country house.

Miss Pinckney objected to "baked meat" and the joints at Vernons were roast, swinging from a clockwork Jack and basted all the time with a long metal ladle.

By the range this morning was seated an old coloured woman engaged in cutting up onions. This was Prue the oldest living thing in Vernons and perhaps in Charleston; she had been kitchen maid before Miss Pinckney was born, then cook, and now, long past work, she was just kept on. Twenty-five years ago she had been offered a pension and a cottage for herself but she refused both. She wanted to die where she was, so she said. So they let her stay, doing odd jobs and bossing the others just as though she were still mistress of the kitchen—as in fact she was. She had become a legend and no one knew her exact age, she was creepin' close to a hundred, and her memory which carried her back to the slave days was marvellous in its retentiveness.

She had cooked a dinner for Jeff Davis when he was a guest at Vernons, she could still hear the guns of the Civil War, so she said, and the Mascarene family history was her Bible.

She looked down on the Pinckneys as trash beside the Mascarenes, and interlopers, and this attitude and point of view though well known to Miss Pinckney was not in the least resented by her.

But during the last few years this old lady's intellect had been steadily coming under eclipse; still insisting on doing little jobs in a futile sort of way, silence had been creeping upon her so that she rarely spoke now, and when she did, by chance, her words revealed the fact that her mind was dwelling in the past.

Rachel, the cook, a sturdy coloured woman with her head bound up in an isabelle-coloured handkerchief was standing by the kitchen table on which she was resting the fore-finger of her left hand, whilst with the right she was turning over some fish that had just been sent in from the fishmonger's. She seemed in a critical mood, but what she said to Miss Pinckney was lost to Phyl whose attention was attracted by a chuckling sound from near the range.

It was Prue.

The old woman at sight of Phyl had dropped the knife and the onion on which she had been engaged. She was now seated, hands on knees, chuckling and nodding to the girl, then, scarcely raising her right hand from her knee, she made a twiddling movement with the fore-finger as if to say, "come here—come here—I have something to tell you."

Phyl glanced at Miss Pinckney who was so taken up with what Rachel was saying about the fish that she noticed nothing. Then she looked again at Prue and, unable to resist the invitation, came towards her. The old woman caught her by the arm so that she had to bend her head.

"Miss Julie," whispered Prue, "Massa Pinckney told me tell yo' he be at de gate t'night same time 'slas' night. Done you let on 's I told yo'," she gave the arm a pinch and relapsed into herself chuckling whilst Phyl stood with a little shiver, half of relief at her escape from that bony clutch, half of dread—a vague dread as though she had come in contact with something uncanny.

She came to the table again and stood without looking at Prue, whilst Miss Pinckney completed her orders, then, that lady, having finished her business and casting an eye about the place on the chance of finding any dirt or litter, saw Prue and asked how she was doing.

"Well, miss, she's doin' fa'r," replied Rachel, "but I'm t'inking she's not long fore de new Jerusalem. Sits didderin' dere 'n' smokin' her pipe, 'n' lays about her wid her stick times, fancyin' there'er dogs comin' into de kitchen."

"A dog bit her once way back in the '60's," said Miss Pinckney; "they used to keep dogs here then. She don't want for anything?"

"Law no, miss, she done want for nothin'; look at her now laffin' to herself. Haven't seen her do that way dis long time. Hi, Prue, what yo' laffin' at?"

Prue, instead of answering leant further forward hiding her face without checking her merriment.

"Crazy," said Miss Pinckney, "but it's better to be laughing crazy than crying crazy like some folk—here's a quarter and get her some candy."

She put the coin on the table and marched off followed by Phyl.

"She wanted to tell me something," said Phyl as they were driving to the cemetery; "she beckoned me to her and took hold of my arm and whispered something."

"What did she say?"

Phyl, somehow, could not bring herself to betray that crazy confidence.

"I don't know, exactly, but she called me Miss Julie."

"Oh—she called you Miss Julie," said the other. Then she relapsed into thought and nothing more was said till they reached their destination.



CHAPTER V

Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery like everything else about Charleston shows the touch of the War. Here the soldiers lie who fought so bravely under Wade Hampton and here lies the general himself.

Go south, go north, and you will not find a place touched by the War where you will not find noble memories, echoes of heroic deeds, legends of brave men.

Miss Pinckney was by no means a peace party and this thought was doubtless in her head as she stood surveying the confederate graves. There were relations here and men whom she had known as a child.

"That's the War," said she, "and people abuse war as if it was the worst thing in the world, insulting the dead. 'Clare to goodness it makes me savage to hear the pasty-faces talking of war and making plans to abolish it. It's like hearing a lot of children making plans to abolish thunder storms. Where would America be now without the War, and where'd her history be? You tell me that. It'd just be the history of a big canning factory. These men aren't dead, they're still alive and fighting—fighting Chicago; fighting pork, and wheat, and cotton and railway-stock and everything else that's abolishing the soul of the nation.

"There's Matt Carey's grave. He had everything he wanted, and he wasn't young. Now-a-days he'd have been driving in his automobile killing old women and chickens, or tarpoon fishing down 'n Florida letting the world go rip, or full of neur—what do they call it—that thing that gets on their nerves and makes crazy old men of them at forty—I've forgotten. He didn't. He took up a gun and died like a lion, and he was a middle-aged business man. No one remembers him, I do believe, except, maybe me, clean forgotten—and yet he helped to put a brick into the only monument worth ten cents that America has got—The War.

"And some northern people would say 'nice sort of brick, seeing he was fighting on the wrong side.' Wrong side or right side he was fighting for something else than his own hand. That's the point."

She closed up her lips and they went on. Phyl found her father's grave in a quiet spot where the live-oaks stood, the long grey moss hanging from their branches.

Miss Pinckney, having pointed out the grave, strayed off, leaving the girl to herself.

The gloomy, strange-looking trees daunted Phyl, and the grave, too young yet to have a headstone, drew her towards it, yet repelled her.

It was like meeting in a dream some one she had loved and who had turned into a stranger in a strange place.

Just as Charleston had dimmed Ireland in her mind as a bright light dims a lesser light, so had some influence come between her and the memory of her father. That memory was just as distinct as ever, but grief had died from it, as though Time had been at work on it for years and years.

The Phyl who had stepped out of the south-bound express and the girl of this morning were the same in mind and body, but in soul and outlook they had changed and were changing as though the air of the south had some magic in it, some food that had always been denied her and which was necessary for her full being.

Miss Pinckney returned from her wanderings amongst the graves and they turned to the gate.

"It used to seem strange to me coming here when I was a girl," said she. "It always seemed as if I was come to visit people who could never come to see me. I used to pity them, but one gets older and one gets wiser, and I fancy it's they that pity us, if they can see us at all, which isn't often likely."

"D'you think they come back?" said Phyl.

"My dear child, if I told you what I thought, you'd say I was plum crazy. But I'll say this. What do you think the Almighty made folk for? to live a few years and then lie in a grave with folk heaping flowers on them? There's no such laziness in nature. I don't say there aren't folk who live their lives like as if they were dead, covered with flowers and never moving a hand to help themselves like some of those N'York women—but they don't count. They're against nature and I guess when they die they die, for they haven't ever lived." Then, vehemently: "Of course, they come back, not as ghosts peekin' about and making nuisances of themselves, but they come back as people—which is the sensible way and there's nothing unsensible in nature. Mind you, I don't say there aren't ghosts, there are, for I've seen 'em; I saw Simon Pinckney, the one that died of drink, as plain as my hand same day he died, but he was a no account. He hadn't the making of a man, so he couldn't come back as a man, and he wasn't a woman, so he couldn't come back as a woman; so he came back as a ghost. He was always an uneasy creature, else I don't suppose he'd have come back as anything. When a man wears out a suit of clothes he doesn't die, he gets a new one, and when he wears out a body—which isn't a bit more than a suit of clothes—he gets a new one. If he hasn't piled up grit enough in life to pay for a new body, he goes about without one and he's a ghost. That's my way of thinking and I know—I know—n'matter."

She put up her sunshade and they returned, driving through the warm spring weather. Phyl was silent, the day had taken possession of her. The scent of pink mimosa filled the air, the blue sky shewed here and there a few feather traces of white cloud and the wind from the sea seemed the very breath of the southern spring.

It seemed to Phyl as they drove that never before had she met or felt the loveliness of life, never till this moment when turning a corner the song of a bird from a garden met them with the perfume of jessamine.

Charleston is full of surprises like that, things that snatch you away from the present or catch you for a moment into the embrace of some old garden lurking behind a wrought iron gate, or tell you a love story no matter how much you don't want to hear it—or tease you, if you are a practical business man, with some other futility which has nothing at all to do with "real" life.

It seemed to Phyl as though, somehow, the whole of the morning had been working up to that moment, as though the perfume of the jessamine and the song of the birds were the culmination of the meaning of all sorts of things seen and unseen, heard and unheard.

The message of the crazy old negress came back to her. Who was Miss Julie? and who was the Mr. Pinckney that was to meet her, and where was the gate at which they were to meet in such a secretive manner? Was it just craziness, or was it possible that this was some real message delivered years and years ago. A real lover's message which the old woman had once been charged to deliver and which she had repeated automatically and like a parrot.

Miss Julie—could it be possible that she meant Miss Juliet—The Juliet Mascarene to whom she, Phyl, bore such a strong family likeness, could it be possible that the likeness had started the old woman's mind working and had recalled the message of a half-a-century ago to her lips.

It was a fascinating thought. Juliet had been in love with one of the Pinckneys and this message was from a Pinckney and one day, perhaps, most likely a fine spring day like to-day, Pinckney had given the negro girl a message to give to Juliet, and the lovers and the message and the bright spring day had vanished utterly and forever leaving only Prue.

The gate would no doubt be the garden gate. Phyl in all her life had never given a thought to Love, she had known nothing of sentiment, that much abused thing which is yet the salt of life, and Romance for her had meant Adventure; all the same she was now weaving all sorts of threads into dreams and fancies. What appealed to her most was her own likeness to Juliet, the girl who had died so many, many years ago. A likeness incomplete enough, according to Miss Pinckney, yet strong enough to awaken memories in the mind of Prue.



CHAPTER VI

"Miss Pinckney," said Phyl, as they sat at luncheon that day, "you remember you said yesterday that I was like Juliet Mascarene?"

"So you are," replied the other, "though the likeness is more noticeable at first sight as far as the face goes—I've got a picture of her I will show you, it's upstairs in her room, the one next yours on the same piazza—why do you ask me?"

"I was thinking," replied Phyl, "that the old woman in the kitchen—Prue—may have meant Juliet when she called me Julie, and that it was the likeness that set her mind going."

"It's not impossible. Prue's like that crazy old clock Selina Pinckney left me in her will. It'd tell you the day and the hour and the minute and the year and the month and the weather. A little man came out if it was going to rain and a little woman if it was going to shine. But if you wanted to know the time, it couldn't tell you nearer than the hour before last of the day before yesterday, and if you sneezed near it, it'd up and strike a hundred and twenty. I gave it to Rachel. She said it was 'some' clock, said it was a dandy for striking and the time didn't matter as the old kitchen clock saw to that. It's the same with Prue, the time doesn't matter, and they look up to her in the kitchen mostly, I expect, because she's an oddity, same as Selina Pinckney's clock. Seems to me anything crazy and useless is reckoned valuable these days, and not only among coloured folk but whites—Dinah, hasn't Mr. Richard come in yet?"

"No, Mistress Pinckney," replied the coloured girl, who had just entered the room, "I haven't seen no sign of him."

"Running about without his luncheon," grumbled the lady, "said he had a deal in cotton on. I might have guessed it." Then when Dinah had left the room and talking half to herself, "There's nothing Richard seems to think of but business or pleasure. I'm not saying anything against the boy, he's as good and better than any of the rest, but like the rest of them his character wants forming round something real. It wasn't so in the old days, they were bad enough then and drank a lot more, but they had in them something that made for something better than business or pleasure. Matt Curry didn't go out and get killed for business or pleasure, and all the old Pinckneys didn't fight in the war or fight with one another for business or pleasure. There's more in life than fooling with girls or buying cotton or sailing yacht races, but Richard doesn't seem to see it. I did think that having a ward to look after would have sobered him a bit and helped to form his character—well, maybe it will yet."

"I don't want to be looked after," said Phyl flushing up, "and if Mr. Pinckney—" she stopped. What she was going to say about Pinckney was not clear in her mind, clouded as it was with anger—anger at the thought that she was an object to be looked after by her "guardian," anger at the implication that he was not bothering to look after her, being too much engaged in the business of fooling with girls and buying cotton, and a reasonable anger springing from and embracing the whole world that held his beyond Vernons.

"Yes?" said Miss Pinckney.

"Oh, nothing," replied the other, trying to laugh and making a failure of the business. "I was only going to say that Mr. Pinckney must have lots to do instead of wasting his time looking after strangers, and if he hadn't I don't want to be looked after. I don't want him to bother about me—I—I—" It did not want much more to start her off in a wild fit of weeping about nothing, her mind for some reason or other unknown even to herself was worked up and seething just as on that day at Kilgobbin when the woes of Rafferty had caused her to make such an exhibition of herself in the library. Anything was possible with Phyl when under the influence of unreasoning emotion like this, anything from flinging a knife at a person to breaking into tears.

Miss Pinckney knew it. Without understanding in the least the psychological mechanism of Phyl, she knew as a woman and by some electrical influence the state of her mind.

She rose from the table.

"Stranger," said she, taking the other by the arm, "you call yourself a stranger. Come along upstairs with me. I want to show you something."

Still holding her by the arm, caressingly, she led her off across the hall and up the stairs; on the first floor landing she opened a door; it was the door of the bedroom next to Phyl's, a room of the same shape and size and with the same view over the garden.

Just as the drawing-room had been kept in its entirety without alteration or touch save the touch of a duster, so had this room, the bedroom of a girl of long ago, a girl who would now have been a woman old and decrepit—had she lived.

"Here's the picture you wanted to see," said Miss Pinckney leading Phyl up to a miniature hanging on the wall near the bed. "That's Juliet, and if you don't see the family likeness, well, then, you must be blind.—And you calling yourself a stranger!"

Phyl looked. It was rather a stiff and finicking little portrait; she fancied it was like herself but was not sure, the colour of the hair was almost the same but the way it was dressed made a lot of difference, and she said so.

"Well, they did their hair different then," replied Miss Pinckney, "and that reminds me, it's near time you put that tail up." She sat down in a rocker by the window and with her hands on her knees contemplated Phyl. "I'm your only female relative, and Lord knows I'm far enough off, anyhow I'm something with a skirt on it, and brains in its head, and that's what a girl most wants when she comes to your age. You'll be asked to parties and things here and you'll find that tail in the way; it's good enough for a schoolgirl, but you aren't that any longer. I'll get Dinah to do your hair, something simple and not too grown-up—you don't mind an old woman telling you this—do you?"

"Indeed I don't," said Phyl. "I don't care how my hair is done, you can cut it off if you like, but I don't want to go to parties."

"Well, maybe you don't," said Miss Pinckney, "but, all the same, we'll get Dinah to look to your hair. Dinah can do most anything in that way; she'd get twice the wages as a lady's maid elsewhere and she knows it, but she won't go. I've told her over and again to be off and better herself, but she won't go, sticks to me like a mosquito. Well, this was Juliet's room just as that's her picture; she died in that bed and everything is just exactly as she left it. It was kept so after her death. You see, it wasn't like an ordinary person dying, it was the tragedy of the whole thing that stirred folk so, dying of a broken heart for the man she was in love with. It set all the crazy poets off like that clock of Selina Pinckney's I was telling you of. The News and Courier had yards of obituary notice and verses. It made people forget the war for a couple of days. There's all her books on that shelf and the diary the poor thing used to keep. Open one of the drawers in that chest."

Phyl did so. The drawer was packed with clothes neatly folded. The air became filled with the scent of lavender.

"There are her things, everything she ever had when she died. It may seem foolish to keep everything like that, foolish and sentimental, and if she'd died of measles or fallen down the stairs and killed herself maybe her old things would have been given away, but dying as she did—well, somehow, it didn't seem right for coloured girls to be parading about in her things. Mrs. Beamis sniffed here just as she sniffed in the drawing-room, and she said, one night, something about sentiment, as if she was referring to chicken cholera. I knew what she meant. She meant we were a pack of fools. Well, she ought to know. I reckon she ought to be a judge of folly—the life she leads in Chicago. Umph!—Now I'm going to lie down for an hour, and if you take my advice you'll do the same. The middle of the day was meant to rest in. You can get to your room by the window."

She kissed Phyl and went off.

Phyl, instead of going to her room, took her seat in the rocker and looked around her. The place held her, something returned to it that had been driven away perhaps by Miss Pinckney's cheerful and practical presence, the faint odour of lavender still clung to the air, and the silence was unbroken except for a faint stirring of the window curtains now and then to the breeze from outside. Everything was, indeed, just as it had been left, the toilet tidies and all the quaint contraptions of the '50's and '60's in their places. On the wall opposite the bed hung several water colours evidently the work of that immature artist Mary Mascarene, a watch pocket hung above the bed, a thing embroidered with blue roses, enough to disturb the sleep of any aesthete, yet beautiful enough in those old days. There was only one stain mark in the scrupulous cleanliness and neatness of the place—a panel by the window, once white painted but now dingy-grey and scored with lines. Phyl got up and inspected it more closely. Children's heights had evidently been measured here. There was a scale of feet marked in pencil, initials, and dates. Here was "M. M.," probably Mary Mascarene, "2 ft. 6 inches. Nineteen months," and the date "April, 1845," and again a year later, "M. M. 2 ft. 9-1/2 inches, May, 1846." So she had grown three and a half inches in a year. "J. M."—Juliet without doubt—"3 feet, 3 years old, 1845." Juliet was evidently the elder—so it went on right into the early '60's, mixed here and there with other initials, amongst which Phyl made out "J. J." and "R. P.," children maybe staying at the house and measured against the Mascarene children—children now old men and women, possibly not even that. It was in the kindly spirit of Vernons not to pass a painter's brush over these scratchings, records of the height of a child that lingered only in the memory of the old house.

Phyl turned from them to the bookshelf and the books it contained. "Noble Deeds of American Women," "Precept on Precept," "The Dairyman's Daughter," and the "New England Primer"—with a mark against the verses left "by John Rogers to his wife and nine small children, and one at the breast, when he was burned at the stake at Smithfield in 1555." There were also books of poetry, Bryant, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Powhatan, a metrical romance in seven cantos by Seba Smith," and several others.

Phyl did something characteristic. She gathered every single book into a pile in her arms and sat down on the floor with them to have a feast. This devourer of books was omnivorous in her tastes, especially if it were a question of sampling, and she had enough critical faculty to enable her to enjoy rubbish. She lingered over Powhatan and its dedication to the "Young People of the United States" and then passed on to the others till she came to a little black book. It was Juliet Mascarene's diary and proclaimed the fact openly on the first page with the statements: "I am twelve years old to-day and Aunt Susan has given me this book to keep as my diary and not to forget to write each day my evil deeds as well as my good, which I will if I remember them. She didn't give me anything else. I had to-day a Paris doll from Cousin Jane Pinckney who has winking eyes which shut when you lay her on her back and pantalettes with scallops which take off and on and a trunk of clothes with a little key to it. Father gave me a Bible and I have had other things too numerous for mension.

"Signed Juliet Mascarene."

with never a date.

Then:

"I haven't done any evil deeds, or good ones that I can remember, so I haven't written in this book for maybe a week. Mary and I, we went to a party at the Pinckneys to-day at Bures, the Calhoun children and the Rutledges were there and we had Lady Baltimore cake and a good time. Mary wore her blue organdie and looked very nice and Rupert Pinckney was there, he's fourteen and wouldn't talk to the children because they were too small for him, I expect. He told me he was going to have a pony same as Silas Rhett that threw him in the market place Wednesday last and galloped all the way to Battery before he was stopped, only his was to be a better one with more shy in it, said Silas Rhett ought to be tied on next time. Then old Mr. Pinckney came in and shewed us a musical snuff-box and we went home, and driving back Mary kicked me on the shin by axident and I pinched her and she didn't cry till we'd got home, then she began to roar and mother said it was my ungovernable temper, and I said I wished I was dead.

"I shan't go to any more parties because it's always like that after them. Father told me I was to pray for a new heart and not to have any supper but Prue has brought me up a cake of her own making. So that's one evil deed to put down—It's just like Mary, any one else would have cried right out in the carriage and not bottled it up and kept it up till she got home.

"This is a Friday and Prue says Friday parties are always sure to end in trouble for the devil puts powder in the cakes and the only way to stop him is to turn them three times round when they're baking and touch them each time with a forked hazel twig."

Phyl read this passage over twice. The mention of Prue interested her vastly. Prue even then had evidently been a favourite of Juliet's.

She read on hoping to find the name of the coloured woman again, but it did not occur.

The diary, indeed, did not run over more than a year and a half, but scrappy as it was and short in point of time, the character of Juliet shone forth from it, uneasy, impetuous, tormenting and loving.

Many books could not have depicted the people round Vernons so well as this scribbling of a child. Mary Mascarene, quiet, rather a spoil-sport and something of a tale-teller, dead and gone Pinckneys and Rhetts. Aunt Susan, Cousin Jane Pinckney, Uncle George who beat his coloured man, Darius, because the said Darius had let him go out with one brass button missing from his blue coat. Simon Pinckney—the one whose ghost walked—and who "fell down in the garden because he had the hiccups," these and others of their time lived in the little black book given by the miserly Aunt Susan "to keep as my diary and not to forget to write each day my evil deeds as well as my good."

Towards the end there was another reference to Rupert Pinckney, the tragic lover of the future:

"Rupert Pinckney was here to-day with his mother to luncheon and we had a palmetto salad and mother said when he was gone he was the most frivulus boy in Charleston, whatever that was, and too much of a dandy, but father said he had stuff in him and Aunt Susan, who was here too, said 'Yes, stuff and nonsense,' and I said he could ride his pony without tumbling off like Silas Rhett, anyhow.

"Then they went on talking about his people and how they hadn't as much money as they used to have, and Aunt Susan said that was so, and the worst of it is they're spending more money than they used to spend, and father said, well, anyhow, that wasn't a very common complaint with some people and he left the room. He never stays long in the room with Aunt S.

"I think the Pinckneys are real nice."

"Mr. Simon Mascarene from Richmond and his wife came to see us to-day and stay for a week. They drove here in their own carriage with four brown horses and you could not tell which horse was which, they are so alike, they are very fine people and Mr. M. has a red face—not the same red as Mr. Simon Pinckney's, but different somehow—more like an apple, and a high nose which makes him look very grand and fine." The same Simon Mascarene, no doubt, that came to the wedding of Charles Pinckney in 1880 as old Simon Mascarene, the one whose flowered carpet bag still lingered in the memory of Miss Pinckney.

"Mrs. M. is very fine too and beautifully dressed and mother gave her a great bouquet of geraniums and garden flowers with a live green caterpillar looping about in the green stuff which nobody saw but me, till it fell on Mrs. M.'s knee and she screamed. There is to be a big party to-morrow and the Pinckneys are coming and Rupert."

There the diary ended.

Phyl put it back on the shelf with the books.

She had not the knowledge necessary to visualise the people referred to, those people of another day when Planters kept open house, when slaves were slaves and Bures the home of the old gentleman with the musical snuff-box, but she could visualise Juliet as a child. The writing in the little book had brought the vision up warm from the past and it seemed almost as though she might suddenly run in from the sunlit piazza that lay beyond the waving window curtains.

There was a bureau in one corner, or rather one of those structures that went by the name of Davenports in the days of our fathers. Phyl went to it and raised the lid. She did so without a second thought or any feeling that it was wrong to poke about in a place like this and pry into secrets. Juliet seemed to belong to her as though she had been a sister, her own likeness to the dead girl was a bond of attraction stronger than a family tie, and Juliet's mournful love story completed the charm.

The desk contained very little, a seal with a dove on it, some sticks of spangled sealing-wax, a paper knife of coloured wood with a picture of Benjamin Franklin on the handle and some sheets of note-paper with gilt edges.

Phyl noticed that the gilt was still bright.

She took out the paper knife and looked at it, and then held the blade to her lips to feel the smoothness of it, drawing it along so that her lips touched every part of the blade.