The character of this new Leighton House, which was never known as Leighton House, but acquired the name of Consolation Cottage by analogy with the Street of the Consolation near which it stood, was as different as could well be both from the prevailing local style of architecture and from the stately colonial type dear to the heart of every Virginian.  The building was long and low, with sloping roofs of flat French tiles.  A broad veranda bordered it on three sides.  The symmetry of the whole was saved from ugliness by a large central gable the overhanging porch of which cast a deep and friendly shadow over the great front door and over the wide flights of steps that led down to the curving driveway.

In that luxuriant clime the new house did not long remain bare.  A clambering wistaria, tree-like geraniums, a giant fuchsia and trellised rose-vines soon embowered the verandas, while, on the south side, English ivy was gradually coaxed up the bare brick wall.  This medley of leaf and bloom gave to the whole house that air of friendliness and homeliness that marks the shrine of the Anglo-Saxon’s household gods the world over.

Such was the nest that the Reverend Orme built by the sweat of his brow to harbor his little family, which, at the beginning of this history, consisted of himself; Ann Leighton, his wife; and Mammy, black as the ace of spades without, white within.

CHAPTER II

Ann Sutherland Leighton was one of those rare religionists that occasionally bloom in a most unaccountable manner on a family tree having its roots in the turf rather than clinging to Plymouth Rock.  Isaac Sutherland, her father, had been knowing in horse-flesh, and would have looked askance on the Reverend Orme Leighton as a suitor had he not also been knowing in men.  The truth was that in Leighton the man was bigger than the parson, and to the conceded fact that all the world loves a lover he added the prestige of the less-bandied truth that all the world loves a fighter.  He, also, knew horse-flesh.  He finally won Ann’s father over on the day when Ike Sutherland learned to his cost that the Reverend Orme could discern through the back of his head that distension of the capsular ligament of the hock commonly termed a bog spavin.

Ann did not share her husband’s extreme views.  It was a personal loyalty that had brought her uncomplaining to a far country, unbuoyed by the Reverend Orme’s dreams of a new state, but seeking with an inward fervidness some scene of lasting peace wherewith to blot out the memory of long years of turmoil and wholesale bereavement.

To her those first years in Consolation Cottage were long—­long with the weight of six thousand miles from home.  Then, with the suddeness of answered prayer, a light came into her darkness.  He was named Shenton.  Mammy’s broad, homesick face broke into an undying smile.  “Sho is mo’ lak ole times, Mis’ Ann, havin’ a young Marster abeout.”  And when, two years later, on a Christmas day, Natalie was born, Mammy mixed smiles with tears and sobbed, “Oh, Mis’ Ann, sho is mo’ an’ mo’ lak ole times.”