If sometimes she wove strange lines of tragedy throughout the dreams, out of the threads of shadow that flitted across the sunshine of her life, she did not reject them.  She felt they belonged there and did not shrink, even when her young face paled at the curious self-pity the passing of the thought invoked.

Hers was a strange mixture, made up of an unusual intermingling of many bloods.  Born in New Orleans, of a father who was a direct descendant of the early French settlers of Louisiana, and of a Creole mother, who might have traced her ancestry back to one of the old grandees of Spain, she yet clung with a jealous affection to the land of her birth and called herself defiantly “a thorough-bred American!” Her mother had died in giving her birth, and her father, while she was still too young to remember, had married a fair Englishwoman who had tried hard to be a mother to the strange little creature whose blood leaped and danced within her veins with all the fire and romance of foreign suns.  Gay and pleasure-mad as she usually appeared, there was always the shadow of a heartache in her eye, and one felt the possibility of a tragedy in her nature.  In fact one felt intuitively sorry—­almost afraid—­for her lest her daring, adventurous spirit should lead her too close to the precipice along the rocky pathway of life.

She was thinking many strange thoughts as she sat looking out of the window.  Her English cousins, related to her only through her stepmother, yet called kin for courtesy’s sake, had given up trying to understand her complexities, as she had likewise given up trying to explain herself.  If they were pleased forever to consider her in the light of a conundrum, she thought, why—­let them!

After a while the ladies at the tea-table began to chat in more confidential tones.  Opal was not too oblivious to her surroundings to notice, nor to grasp the fact that they were discussing her, but that knowledge did not interest her.  She was so used to being considered a curiosity that it had ceased to have any special concern for her.  She only hoped that they would sometime succeed in understanding her better than she had yet learned to understand herself.  It might have interested her, however, had she overheard this particular conversation, for it shed a great light upon certain shades of character she had discovered in herself and often wondered about, but had never had explained to her.

But she did not hear.

“I am greatly concerned about Opal,” Lady Alice was saying.  “She is the most difficult creature, Mamma—­you’ve no idea how peculiar—­with the most dangerous, positively immoral ideas.  I do wish she were safely married, for then—­well, there is really no knowing what might happen to a girl who thinks and talks as she does.  I used to think it might be a sort of American pose—­put on for startling effect, you know—­but I begin to think she actually means it!”