Pocahontas related her adventure gleefully when they were all assembled at dinner; and the amusement it excited was great.  Berkeley insisted teasingly that her deliverer would develop into one of the workmen from Washington, employed by General Smith in the renovation of Shirley.  One of the carpenters, or—­as he looked gentlemanly and wore a coat, a fresco man, abroad in search of an original idea for the dining-room ceiling.  This idea she had obligingly furnished him, and he would be able to make a very effective ceiling of her, and Sawney, and the sheep, if he should handle them rightly.  These suggestions Pocahontas scouted, maintaining gayly that the dark stranger was none other than her “Smith,” the very identical John of her destiny.

Later she confided to her brother her conjecture relative to the identity of their new neighbor, and was more delighted than surprised to learn from him that her surmise had been correct.  Berkeley had obtained the information from the solicitor in Wintergreen, who had been employed in the transfer of the estate.

CHAPTER VII.

The Smith family speedily settled down into their new home, and after the first feeling of strangeness had worn off, were forced to acknowledge that the reality of country living was not so disagreeable as they had anticipated.  The neighborhood was pleasantly and thickly settled, the people kind-hearted and hospitable.  True, Mrs. Smith still secretly yearned for modern conveniences and the comforts of a daily market, and felt that time alone could reconcile her to the unreliability and inefficiency of colored servants, but even she had compensation.  Her husband—­whose time, since his retirement, had hung like lead upon his hands, was busy, active and interested, full of plans, and reveling in the pure delight of buying expensive machinery for the negroes to break, and tons of fertilizers for them to waste.  The girls were pleased, and Norma happier and less difficult than she had been for years.  And, best and most welcome of all, Warner appeared to strengthen.  As for Percival, his satisfaction knew no bounds; his father had given him a gun and Nesbit Thorne was teaching him how to use it.

At the eleventh hour Nesbit Thorne had decided to accompany his relatives in their flitting, instead of waiting to visit them later in the season.  He was incited thereto by idleness and ennui, leavened by curiosity as to the manner in which their future life would be ordered, and also by a genuine desire to be of service to them in the troublesome move.  Perhaps there was, besides, an unacknowledged feeling in his breast, that with the departure of his kindred, New York would become lonelier, more wearisome than ever.  They had given him a semblance of a home, and there was in the man’s nature an undercurrent of yearning after love and the rounding out of true domestic life, that fretted and chafed in its obstructed channel, and tried here and there blindly for another outlet.