And so they rambled around and talked, unheeding the time until the early twilight began to fall and Mrs. Buchanan was summoned by Jeff to a consultation in the domestic regions with the autocratic Tempie.

Left to herself, Caroline Darrah wandered back again through the rooms from one object to another that inspired the stories.  It was like fairy-land to her and she was in a long dream of pleasure.  Out of the shadows she seemed to be drawing her wistful young mother, and hand in hand they were going over the past together.

When it was quite deep into the twilight she sauntered back to the crackling comfort of the major’s fragrant logs.  A discussion with Jeff over his toilet had delayed the major in his bedroom and she found the library deserted, but hospitable with firelight.

How long she had been musing and castle-building in the coals she scarcely knew, when a step on the polished floor made her look up, and with a little exclamation she rose to her full, slim, young height and turned to face a man who had come in with the unannounced surety of a member of the household.  He was tall, broad and dark, and his knickerbockers were splashed with mud and covered with clinging burrs and pine-needles.  One arm was lashed to his side with a silk sling and he held a huge bunch of glowing red berries in his free hand.  They were branches of the red, coral-strung buck bushes and Caroline had never seen them before.  Their gorgeousness fairly took her breath and she exclaimed with the ingenuous delight of a child.

“How lovely, how lovely!” she cried as she stretched out her hands for them.  “I never saw any before.  Do they grow here?”

“Yes,” answered the man with a gleam of amusement in his dark eyes, “yes, they came from Seven Oaks.  The fields are full of them now.  Do you want them?” And as he spoke he laid the bunch in her arms.

“And they smell woodsy and piny and delicious.  Thank you!  I—­they are lovely.  I—­” She paused in wild confusion, looked around the room as if in search of some one, and ended by burying her face in the berries.  “I don’t know where Major Buchanan is,” she murmured helplessly.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” he said with a comforting smile as he came up beside her on the rug.  “They’ll introduce us when they come.  I’m Andrew Sevier and the berries are yours, so what matter?”

“Oh,” said Caroline Darrah in an awed voice, and as she spoke she raised her head from the wood flowers and her eyes to his face, “oh, are you really Andrew Sevier?”

“Yes, really,” he answered with another smile and a slightly puzzled expression in his own dark eyes.

“But I read everything I can find about you, and the papers say you are ill in Panama.  I’ve been so worried about you.  I saw your play last week in New York and I couldn’t enjoy it for wondering how you were.  I wouldn’t read your poem in this month’s Review because I was afraid you were dead—­and I didn’t know it.  I’m so relieved.”  With which astonishing remark she drew a deep breath and laid her cheek against the field bouquet.