“Look youh fill, my deah child; thah it lies—­God’s country, and youh’s and mine; the fines’, the most inspiring, the most beautiful land the sun eveh shone on!  And whilst you are givin’ praise to youh Makeh for creatin’ such a Gyarden of Eden, don’t forget to thank him on youh bended knees for not putting anything oveh yondeh in ouh home lot to tempt these house-buildin’, money-makin’, schemin’ Yankees that are swarming again oveh the land like anotheh plague of Egyptian locus’es.”

“These—­Yankees?” queried Ardea.  In his later years the exiled Captain Louis had remembered only that he was an American, and his child knew no North nor South.

The Major did not explain.  Not that there were any compunctions of conscience concerning the planting of the seed of sectionalism in this virgin soil, quite the contrary.  He abstained because he made sure that time, and the Dabney blood, would do it better.

So he talked to the small one of safely prehistoric things, showing her the high mountain battle-field where John Sevier had broken the power of the savage Chickamaugas, and, as the carriage rolled down toward the head of Paradise, the tract of land where the first Dabney had sent his ax-men to blaze the trees for his lordly boundaries.

It was all new and very strange to a child whose only outlook on life had been urban and banal.  She had never seen a mountain, and nothing more nearly approaching a forest than the parked groves of the Bois de Boulogne.  Would it be permitted that she should sometimes walk in the woods of the first Dabney, she asked, with the quaint French twisting of the phrases that she was never able fully to overcome.

It would certainly be permitted; more, the Major would make her a deed to as many of the forest acres as she would care to include in her promenade.  By which we see that the second part of Unc’ Scipio’s prophecy was finding its fulfilment in the beginning.

How the French-born child fitted into the haphazard household at Deer Trace Manor, with what struggles she came through the inevitable attack of homesickness, and how Mammy Juliet and every one else petted and indulged her, are matters which need not be dwelt on.  But we shall gladly believe that she was too sensible, even at the early and tender age of ten, to be easily spoiled.

Many foolish things have been said and written about the wax-like quality of a child’s mind; how each new impression effaces the old, and how character in permanence is not to be looked for until the bones have stopped growing.  Yet who has not known criminals at twelve, and saints and angels, and wise men and women—­in fine, the entire gamut of humanity—­in short frocks or knee-breeches?

Ardea, child of adversity and the Paris ateliers, brought one lasting memory up out of those early Deer Trace Manor years:  she was always immeasurably older than such infants as Mammy Juliet and Uncle Scipio.  And this also she remembered:  that when these and all the others, including her grandfather and Japheth Pettigrass, were busily leveling all the barriers of restraint for her, she had built some of her own and set herself the task of living within them.