him could not be converted into something warmer.  Her friends wished it; his friends wished it.  It was the natural and proper thing to have happened, and yet with her it had not happened.  With Pocahontas, marriage was a very sacred thing, not to be contemplated lightly, or entered into at all without the sanctification of a pure, unselfish love.  If she should marry Jim now, it would be with the knowledge that the depths of her nature were unstirred, the true rich gold still hidden.  It did not seem to her that her old playfellow’s hand was the one destined to stir the one, or discover the other.  She might judge wrongly, but so it appeared to her, and she was too loyal to Jim to imagine for an instant that he would be satisfied with aught save her very best.

The evening freshened as the sun went down, a vagrant breeze stole out from some leafy covert and disported itself blithely.  The big Irish setter moved from the corner to the top step, and ceased yawning.  An old colored man appearing from behind the house took his way across the lawn in quest of the colts.  The dog, with his interest in life reawakened, bounded off the steps prepared to lend valuable assistance, but was diverted from this laudable object by the approach of two gentlemen who must be welcomed riotously.

Pocahontas, rising, advanced out of the shadow to meet them—­Jim Byrd, and a tall broad-shouldered man with a great silky red beard, her brother-in-law, Mr. Royall Garnett.

CHAPTER IV.

After a joyous exchange of greeting with her brother-in-law, of whom she was unusually fond, and a sweet, gracious welcome to her old play-fellow, Pocahontas withdrew to tell her mother of their arrival, and to assure herself that every thing was perfectly arranged for Jim’s last meal among them.

Through some strange deficiency in herself, she was unable to give him what he most desired, but what she could give him she lavished royally.  She wore her prettiest dress in his honor, and adorned it with his favorite flowers, forgetful in her eagerness to please him, that this might make things harder for him.  She ordered all the dishes she knew he liked for tea, and spent a couple of hours in the hot kitchen that scorching morning preparing a cake that he always praised.  With eager haste she took from its glass-doored cabinet the rare old Mason china, and rifled the garden of roses to fill the quaint century old punch-bowl for the center of the table.  All things possible should be done to make Jim feel himself, that night, the honored guest, the person of most importance in their world.  It was an heirloom—­the Mason china—­quaint and curious, and most highly prized.  There was a superstition—­how originated none knew—­that the breakage of a piece, whether by design or accident, foreboded misfortune to the house of Mason.  Very carefully it was always kept, being only used on rare occasions when special honor was intended.  During the civil war it had lain securely hidden in a heavy box under the brick pavement of one of the cellar rooms, thereby escaping dire vicissitudes.  Many pieces had been broken, said to have been followed in every case by calamities harder to endure than the loss of precious porcelain, but much of it still remained.  In design it was unique, in execution wonderful, and its history was romantic.