Aunt Verbeny fixed her eyes upon the general and he quailed.

“Don’t I take care of you, Aunt Verbeny?” he asked appealingly; but Eugenia, having greeted the remaining servants, drew him with her into the dining-room.  When he sat down at last to the heavily laden table, he seemed to have grown twenty years younger.  As Eugenia hung over him with domineering devotion, the irritable expression faded from his face and he grew almost jovial.  When she weakened his coffee, he protested delightedly, and when she refused to allow him his nightly dole of preserved quinces, he stormed with rapture.  “She wants to starve me, the tyrant,” he declared.  “She’ll take the very bread from my mouth next.”

Then his enthusiasm overcame him.

“That’s the finest girl in the world, Chris!  God bless her, her heart’s as warm as her eyes.  Why, she’d damn herself to do a kindness.”

Miss Chris appeared to remonstrate.

“I am surprised, Tom,” she said disapprovingly, though why she was surprised or what she was surprised at the general never knew.

When Eugenia went upstairs that night, she blew out her candle and undressed by the full light of the moon as it shone through the giant sycamore.  Outside, the lawn lay like a sheet unrolled, rent by sharp black shadows.  All the dear, familiar objects were draped by the darkness as by a curtain; the body of the sycamore assumed a spectral pallor, and the small rockery near by was as mysterious as a tomb.  From the dusk beneath the window the fragrance of the mimosa tree floated into the room.

Eugenia, in her long, white nightgown, fell upon her bed and slept.

The next day she went the rounds of the farm.  “I’m coming back to take you for exercise,” she remarked to the general as she stood before him in her sunbonnet.

The general, who was placidly smoking, groaned in protest.

“Then you’ll kill me, Eugie,” he urged.  “Exercise doesn’t suit me.  I’m too heavy.”

“You’ll get lighter,” returned Eugenia reassuringly.  “You don’t move about half enough, but I’ll make you.”

The general groaned again, and Miss Chris, pink and fresh in her linen sacque, came out upon the porch.

“Bless the child!” she exclaimed.  “Where on earth did she lay hands on that bonnet?  Don’t stay out too long in the sun, Eugie, or you’ll burn black.”

The general caught at the straw.

“I wish you’d tell her she ought to sit in the house, Chris. She wants to drag me—­me out in that heat.”  But Eugenia drew the sunbonnet over her dark head and disappeared across the lawn.

* * * * *

Having inspected the farmyard and the stables, she crossed the ragged field to the negro cabins, where she was received with hilarity.

“Ain’t I al’ays tell you she uz de fines’ lady in delan’?” demanded Delphy of the retreating Moses.  “Ain’t I al’ays tell you dar wa’n’t her match in dese yer parts or outer dem?  I ax you, ain’t I?”