She was very dainty and lovely, was Caroline Darrah Brown, with the loveliness of a windflower and young with the innocent youngness of an April day.  She was slightly different from any girl the major had ever known and he observed her type with the greatest interest.

She had been tutored and trained and French-convented and specialized by adepts in the inculcating of every air and grace with which the women of vaster wealth are expected to be equipped.  Money and the girl had been the ruling passions of Peters Brown’s life and the one had been all for the serving purposes of the other.  It had been the one aim of his existence to bring to a perfect flowering the new-born bud his southern wife had left him, and he had succeeded.  Yet she seemed so slight a woman-thing to be bearing the burden of a great wealth and a great loneliness that the major’s eyes grew very tender as he asked: 

“What is it, clear, a crumpled rose-leaf?”

“Major,” she answered as her slender fingers opened and closed a book on the table near her, “did you realize that two months have passed since I came to—­to—­”

“Came home, child,” prompted the major as he touched lightly the restless hand near his own.

“I am beginning to feel as if it might be that, and yet I don’t know—­not until I talk to you about it all.  Everybody has been good to me.  I feel that they really care and I love it—­and them all!  But, Major, did you—­know—­my father—­well?”

“Yes, my dear.”  He answered, looking her straight in the eyes, “I knew Peters Brown and had pleasantly hostile relations with him always.”

“This memorandum—­I got it together before I came down here, while I was settling up his estate.  It is the list of the investments he made while in the South for the twenty years after the war.  I want to talk them over with you.”  She looked at the major squarely and determinedly.

“Fire away,” he answered with courage in his voice that belied the feeling beneath it.

“I see that in eighteen seventy-nine he bought lumber lands from Hayes Donelson.  The price seems to have been practically nominal in view of what he sold a part of them for three years later.  Was Hayes Donelson Phoebe’s father?  I want to know all about him.”

“My dear, you are giving a large order for ancient history—­Captain Donelson couldn’t fill it himself if he were alive.  Those lumber lands were just a stick or two that he threw on the grand bonfire.  He sold everything he had and instituted and ran the most inflammatory newspaper in the South.  He gloried in an attitude of non-reconstruction and died when Phoebe was a year old.  Her mother raised Phoebe by keeping boarders, but failed to raise the mortgage on the family home.  She died trying and Phoebe has kept her own sleek little head above water since her sixteenth year by reporting and editing Dimity Doings on the paper her father founded.  I think she has learned a pretty good swimming stroke by this time.  It is still a measure ahead of that of David Kildare and—­”