“You had better look out,” another man had said to him.  “You have trodden on the toes of a tiger when you have trodden on the toes of a Carroll.  Sooner or later you will have to pay for it.”

No one in the little Kentucky village knew what had become of Arthur Carroll for some time, with the exception of an aunt of Mrs. Carroll’s, who was possessed of some property and who lived there.  She knew, but she told nothing, probably because she had a fierce pride of family.  After years the Carroll girls, Ina and Charlotte, had come back to their father’s birthplace and attended a small school some three miles distant from the village, a select young ladies’ establishment at which their mother had been educated, and they had visited rather often at their great-aunt Catherine’s.  After they had finished school, the great-aunt had paid the bills, although nobody knew it, not even the elderly sisters who kept the school, since the aunt lied and stated that Captain Carroll had sent the money.  Arthur Carroll was called captain then, and nobody knew why, least of all Carroll himself.  Suddenly he had been called captain, and after making a disclaimer or two at first, he had let it go; it was a minor dishonesty, and forced upon him in a measure.  The old aunt calmly stated that he had joined the army, been rapidly promoted, and had resigned.  People laughed a little, but not to her face.  Besides, she had stated that Arthur was a very rich man, and much thought of among the Yankees, and nobody was in a position to disprove that.  Certainly when the feminine Carrolls visited in the old place, their appearance carried out the theory of riches.  They were very well dressed, and they looked well fed, with that placid, assured air which usually comes only from the sense of possession.

The feminine Carrolls had been speaking of this old aunt that spring day as they sat idly in the little green-curtained temple beside the pond.  They had indulged in a few low, utterly gentle, and unmalicious laughs of reminiscence at some of her eccentricities; then they had agreed that she was a good old soul, and said no more of her, but gazed with languorous delight at the spring scene misty with green and rose and gold like the smoke of some celestial fire.

Through the emerald dazzle of the trailing willow-boughs could be seen a small, blooming apple-tree, and a bush full of yellow flowers.  Miss Anna Carroll and Ina held books in their laps, but they never looked in them.  They were all very well dressed and they wore quite a number of fine jewels on their hands and at their necks, particularly Mrs. Carroll.  Her stones, though only of the semi-precious kind, were very beautiful, amethysts which had belonged to a many-times-removed creole grandmother of hers, and the workmanship of whose fine setting dated back to France, and there was a tradition of royal ownership.  Mrs. Carroll had a bracelet, a ring, a brooch, and a necklace.  The stones, although deeply tinted, showed pink now instead of purple.  In fact, they seemed to match the soft, rose-tinted India silk which she wore.