“Good!  I’ll tell you what let’s do.  You come by for me to-morrow afternoon and I’ll go with you to the Capitol and I’ll beard the General Lion in his den and ask him to let us be friends, and then we’ll take him out to the Confederate Soldiers’ Home for ’flags down’—­it mellowed him so once, when I was about ten, that he let me trot home beside him holding his hand, though he didn’t speak to me for a week after.  Want to?” I did enjoy the mischief in those merry eyes that I laughed into.

“I’ll steal his big car and come and help you—­what do you say?—­kidnap my Uncle, the General Robert,” I answered her with delight as I released her into the arms of that Buzz Clendenning before the fox had been more than half trotted.

“Go pick roses out of your own garden, L’Aiglon,” he said as he slid her away from me.

And for the reason that I was very slightly fatigued and also slightly warm from being obliged to dance in the very heavy swathings of a gentleman, when I had been accustomed to the coolness of chiffon and tulle and thin lace of a lady, I went again into the broad hall and to the wide window that looked away to those comforting blue hills.  Below me the garden was coming out of a veil of mist as the moon, which was now very old, came slowly up from behind the dim ridge of hills that my Uncle the General Robert had told me to be called Paradise Ridge.  All the spring flowers below me seemed to be sending up to me greetings of perfumes and the tall purple and white lilac flowers waved plumes of friendliness at me, while large round pink blossoms that I think are called peonies, nodded and beckoned to me with sweet countenances.  I felt that they were flower friends who in their turn were saying messages of welcome to the lonely girl who had come across the dark waters to them and in my throat I began to hum that “Say can you see—­” Star Spangled hymn to them, and was just preparing to step from the window onto a balcony and descend to them, when a movement of human beings caught my eye upon the side of that balcony and I paused in the darkness of the window curtain.  What did I see?

A man stood at the rail of the balcony in the dim moonlight and he was speaking to a woman whom his broad shoulders hid from me.  The man was the Gouverneur Faulkner of the State of Harpeth and in a moment I discovered the identity of the lady with him.

“And now, can’t you see, you great big stupid man, what an opportunity I have procured for all of you?” was the question that came in the soft voice of the beautiful Madam Patricia Whitworth.  “All my life I have worked just to get a little ease and comfort, carrying the burden of Jeff in his incompetency strapped to my shoulders, and now you, who know how I’ve suffered and slaved, are going to take it all from me when it is just within my reach, and all from no earthly reason than a fancied scruple of honor which that old doddering woman-hater imposes on you.  I cannot believe that you would so treat me.”  And there were sobs in her words that were wooing and compelling.