“Why not, Mrs. Payt,” she answered with the utmost cordiality.  “And let’s be sure and find something he really wants to present to him as a testimony of our esteem.”

“Oh, Phoebe,” trilled Polly, her emotions getting the better of her as she stood with score-card in hand waiting for the game to begin, “I can’t keep from loving him myself and you treat him so mean!”

But a gale of merriment interrupted her outburst and a flutter of cards on the felts marked the first rounds of the hands.  In a few minutes they were as absorbed as if nothing had happened to ruffle the depths; but in the pool of every woman’s nature the deepest spot shelters the lost causes of life, and from it wells a tidal wave if stirred.

After a little while Caroline Darrah rose from a dummy and spoke in a low pleading tone to Polly, who had been watching her game, standing ready to score.  Polly demurred, then consented and sat down while Caroline Darrah took her departure, quietly but fleetly, down the side steps.

She was muffled in her long furs and she swung her sable toque with its one drooping plume in her hand as she walked rapidly across the tennis-courts, cut through the beeches and came out on the bank of the brawling little Silver Fork Creek, that wound itself from over the ridge down through the club lands to the river.  She stood by the sycamore for a moment listening delightedly to its chatter over the rocks, then climbed out on the huge old rock that jutted out from the bank and was entwined by the bleached roots of the tall tree.  The strong winter sun had warmed the flat slab on the south side and, sinking down with a sigh of delight, she embraced her knees and bent over to gaze into the sparkling little waterfall that gushed across the foot of the boulder.

Then for a mystic half-hour she sat and let her eyes roam the blue Harpeth hills in the distance, that were naked and stark save for the lace traceries of their winter-robbed trees.  As the sun sank a soft rose purple shot through the blue and the mists of the valley rose higher about the bared breasts of the old ridge.

And because of the stillness and beauty of the place and hour, Caroline Darrah began, as women will if the opportunity only so slightly invites them, to dream—­until a crackle in a thicket opposite her perch distracted her attention and sent her head up with a little start.  In a second she found herself looking across the chatty little stream straight into the eyes of Andrew Sevier, in which she found an expression of having come upon a treasure with distracting suddenness.

“Oh,” she said to break the silence which seemed to be settling itself between them permanently, “I think I must have been dreaming and you crashed right in.  I—­I—­”

“Are you sure you are not the dream itself—­just come true?” demanded the poet in a matter-of-fact tone, as if he were asking the time of day or the trail home.