“I don’t know what makes you think so.”

“Don’t you?  I’ll show you,” she said, and swung me around to face a mirror. “That’s what makes me think so.  Sophy Smith, unless he’s a liar—­and Peacocks and Ivory couldn’t be a liar to save his life—­the woman Nicholas Jelnik loves looks back at you every time you look in the glass.”

I shook my head.  I have never been able to tell pleasant lies to myself.

“Well, we’ll see what we’ll see!  I told you once before that you hadn’t caught up with the change in yourself.”  And she kissed me and laughed.  It came to me that she couldn’t have cared much for him, herself, to be able to laugh that light-heartedly.

* * * * *

When Miss Emmeline and the English folk were leaving Hynds House, everybody in Hyndsville turned out to say “Good-by.”  Even our lanky old Judge was on hand, with a great bunch of carnations and a huge box of bonbons for Miss Emmeline.

“Sophy,” Miss Emmeline said, smiling, “I don’t see anything left for me to do but come back to Hyndsville, do you?”

“No, I don’t.  And come soon.  Hynds House won’t feel the same without you.  I thought of all she had taught me by just being her fine, frank self, and looked at her gratefully.  She looked back at me quizzically, and of a sudden she slipped her arm around my shoulders.

“Sophy Smith,” said she, softly, “I have met many women in my time, many far more brilliant and beautiful, and what the world calls gifted, than you.  But I have met none with a greater capacity for unselfish loving.  It’s easy enough to win love, a harder thing to keep it, but divinest of all to give it and keep on giving it.  And there’s where your great gift lies, Sophy.”  And she kissed me, with misty eyes, and such a tender face!

That put such a friendly, warm glow in my heart that I was sorry to part even with the Englishman’s daughter, Athena though she was, and I mortally afraid of her.  As for her father, he was bewailing the parting with Alicia, whose Irishness was a manna in the wilderness to him.

“It’s like saying good-by to the Fountain of Youth,” he lamented.  “You’re more than a pretty girl:  you’re the eternal feminine in Irish!”

“She’s the Eternal Irish in proper English, that’s what she is!” said The Author darkly, and looked so wise that everybody looked respectful, though nobody knew what he meant.  Perhaps he didn’t know, himself.

After the train had gone, Doctor Geddes hustled us into his waiting car.

“I’m going to take you for a quiet spin in the country, to make the better acquaintance of Madame Spring-in-Carolina,” he said.  A few minutes later he swung the car into a lonesome and lovely road edged with pines, and sassafras, and sumach, and cassena bushes, and festooned with vines.  Madame Spring-in-Carolina had coaxed the green things to come out and grow, and the people of the sky to try their jeweled wings in her fine new sunlight.  The Judas-tree was red, the dogwood white, the honey-locust a breath from Eden.  A blossomy wind came out of the heart of the world, and there were birds everywhere, impudently eloquent.