They were a charming group in the little, green, gloomy place, each with the strongest possible family likeness to the others.  They were as much alike as the roses on one bush; all were, although not tall, long, and slim of body, and childishly round of face, with delicate coloring; all had pathetic dark eyes and soft lengths of dark hair.  Mrs. Carroll and her husband’s sister, although not nearly related (Mrs. Carroll had married her many-times-removed cousin), resembled each other as if they had been sisters of one family, and the children resembled their mother.  The only difference among any of them was a slight difference of expression that existed mostly in the youngest girl, Charlotte.  There were occasions when Charlotte Carroll’s expression of soft and pathetic wistfulness and pleading could change to an expression of defiance, almost fierceness.

Her mother often told her that she resembled in disposition her paternal grandmother, who had been a woman of high temper, albeit a great beauty.

“Charlotte, dear, you are just like your grandmother, dear Arthur’s mother, who was the worst-tempered and loveliest woman in Kentucky,” Mrs. Carroll often remarked.  She scarcely sounded the t in Kentucky, since she also was of the South, where the languid air tends to produce elisions.  The Carrolls came originally from Kentucky, and had lived there until after the births of the two daughters.  When they were scarcely more than infants, Arthur Carroll had experienced the petty and individual, but none the less real, cataclysm of experience which comes to most men sooner or later.  It is the earthquake of a unit, infinitesimal, but entirely complete of its kind, and possibly as far-reaching in its thread of consequences.  Arthur Carroll had had his palmy days, when he was working with great profits, and, as he believed, with entire righteousness and regard to his fellow-men, a coal-mine in the Kentucky mountains.  He had inherited it from his father, as the larger part of his patrimony.  When most of the property had been dissipated, at the time of the civil war, the elder Carroll, who was broken by years and reverses, used often to speak of this unimproved property of his, to his son Arthur, who was a young boy at the time.  Anna, who was a mere baby, was the only other child.

“When you are a man, Arthur,” he was fond of remarking—­“when you are a man, you must hire some money, sell what little is left here, if necessary, and work that coal-mine.  I always meant to do it myself, and reckon I should have, if that damned war had not taken the money and the strength out of the old man.  But when you are a man, Arthur, you must work that mine, and you must build up what the war has torn down.  You can buy back and restore, Arthur, and if the South should get back her rights by that time, as she may, why, then, you can stock up the old place again, and go on as your father did.”