“Be good to her,” exclaimed David heartily, “just watch me!  I am loving her already for making you so happy by this down-from-the-sky drop, Mrs. Matilda.  And we’ll all be careful about the carpetbags; won’t even mention a rug; lots of talk can be got out of the dead governors I’m thinking.  My welcome’s getting more enthusiastic every moment.  When can I hand it to her?”

“She’s resting now and I think she ought to be quiet for to-day, because she has been under a strain,” answered Mrs. Buchanan as she glanced tenderly at a closed door across the hall.  “Oh, I’m so glad you think you are going to love her in spite of—­of—­”

“The Brown graft on the Darrah family tree?” finished David quizzically.  His eyes danced with delighted amusement across her puffs at the major as he added, “Must have been silversmiths dangling on most of his ancestral branches, judging from his propensity for making dollars; a million or two, stocks, bonds, any kind of flimflam,—­eh, Major?”

“Yes,” answered the major as he blew a ring of smoke into the air, “yes, just about that; any kind of flimflam.  And I can not conceive of Peters Brown rejoicing at having thirty thousand of those dollars put into an In Memoriam to the women who sniffed at him and his carpetbags for a good twenty years after the war.  But the child doesn’t take any of that in.  Those were twenty rich years he put in in reconstructing us, but when he took those same heavy carpetbags North he took Mary Caroline Darrah, the prettiest woman in the county with him.  This girl—­as I have said before, isn’t love a strange thing?  And you say the populace was astonished?”

“Almost to the point of paralyzation,” answered David as he filled a stray pipe with some of the major’s most choice heart-leaf tobacco.  “But we managed to open up the picture show all right.  The entire hive of busy art-bees was there in a queer kind of clothes; but proud of it.  They acted as if we were dirt under their feet.  They smiled on the whole glad-crowd of us with pity and let us rave over the wrong pictures.  The portrait of Mrs. Peyton Kendrick by the great Susie Carrie Snow is—­er—­well, a little more of it shows than seems natural about the left off arm, but it’s a Susie Carrie all right.  You ought to have gone, Major, you would take with the art-gang, but we didn’t; we were too afraid of them.  After we had been shooed in front of most of the pictures and told how to see things in them that weren’t there at all, Hob Capers said: 

“’Let’s all go down to the University Club and get drunk to forget ’em.’  That’s why Mrs. Matilda came home so late.”

“And I want Hobson to be nice to her too,” continued Mrs. Buchanan as if she had not been interrupted in planning for her guest.  “And Tom and Peyton Kendrick.  I’ll ask them to come and see her right away.”

“Don’t!  Wait a bit, Mrs. Matilda,” exclaimed David.  “Hob saw a mysterious girl in an orchid hat out in the park day before yesterday.  He says his heart creaked with expansion at just the glimpse of a chin he got from under her veil.  Suppose she’s the girl.  Let him have first innings.”