“That, Caroline Darrah Brown, was your first and most important conquest,” observed the major.  “Phoebe has a white rock heart but a crystal cracked therefrom is apt to turn into a jewel of price.  Hers is a blood-ruby friendship that pays for the wearing and cherishing.  But it’s time for the nap Mrs. Matilda decides for me to take and I must leave you ladies to your dimity talk.”  With which he betook himself to his room, still plainly pleased at the result of Phoebe’s call on the stranger.

The two women thus left to their own devices spent a delightful half-hour wandering over the house and discussing its furnishings and arrangements.  Mrs. Buchanan never tired of the delights of her town home.  The house was very stately and old-world, with its treasures of rare ancestral rosewood and mahogany that she had brought in from the Seven Oaks Plantation.  The rooms in the country home had been so crowded with treasures of bygone generations that they were scarcely dismantled by the furnishing of the town house.

She was in her glory of domesticity, and as she passed from one room to another she told Caroline bits of interesting history about this piece or that.  In her naiveté she let the girl see into the long hard years that had been a hand-to-hand struggle for her and the major on their worn farm lands out in the beautiful Harpeth Valley.

The cropping out of phosphate on the bare fields had brought a comfortable fortune in its train to the old soldier farmer and they had moved into this town house to spend the winter in greater accessibility to their friends.  Her own particular little world had welcomed her with delight, and Caroline could see that she was taking a second bellehood as if it had been an uninterrupted reign.

Most of the financiers of the city were the major’s old friends and they managed enormously advantageous contracts with mining companies for him, and had taken him into the schemes of the mighty with the most manifest cordiality.

His study became the scene of much important plot and counter-plot.  They found in his mind the quality which had led them to outwit many an enemy when he scouted ahead of their tattered regiment, still available when the enemy appeared under commercial or civic front.  Also it naturally happened that his library gradually became the hunting-grounds for Mrs. Matilda’s young people, who were irresistibly drawn into the circle of his ever ready sympathy.

The whole tale and its telling was absorbingly interesting to Caroline Darrah Brown and she listened with enraptured attention to it all.  She repeated carefully the names of her mother’s friends as they came up in the conversation; and she was pathetically eager to know all about this world she had come back into, from, what already seemed to her, her birth in a strange land.  Two days in this country of her mother, and the enchantment of traditions that had been given to her unborn was already at work with its spell!