“My handkerchief—­Tiberius—­my—­han—­”

She had fought against fearful odds, with sleepless nights and fasting days sapping her strength; and when the battle ended, though the will was unfaltering, physical exhaustion triumphed, and delirium mercifully took the tortured spirit into her cradling arms.

CHAPTER X.

When Leo Gordon celebrated her twenty-second birthday, Judge Dent, appreciating the importance of familiarizing her with the business details and technicalities of commercial usage, incident to the management of her large estate, had insisted upon terminating his guardianship, and transferring to her all responsibility for the future conduct of her financial affairs.  New books were placed in her hands, in which he required her to keep systematically and legibly all her accounts; she drew and signed her own checks, and semi-annually furnished for his inspection a neat balance-sheet.

As adviser, and agent for the collection of dividends and rents, the change or renewal of investments, he maintained only a general supervision, and left her untrammelled the use of her income.  As a dangerous innovation upon time-honored customs, which under the ante bellum regime, had kept Southern women as ignorant of practical business routine, as of the origin of the Weddas of Ceylon, Miss Patty bitterly opposed and lamented her brother’s decision; dismally predicting that the result must inevitably be the transformation of their refined, delicate, clinging “Southern lady”, into that abhorred monster—­“a strong-minded independent business woman”.

Intensely loyal to the social standard, usages and traditions of an aristocracy, that throughout the South had guarded its patrician ranks with almost Brahmin jealousy, she sternly decried every infringement of caste custom and etiquette.  Nature and education had combined to deprive her of any adaptability to the new order of things; and she rejected the idea that “a lady should transact business”, with the same contemptuous indignation that would have greeted a proposition to wear “machine-sewed garments”, that last resort of impecunious plebeianism.  However unwelcome Leo had found this assumption of the grave duties of mature womanhood, she met the responsibility unflinchingly, and gathered very firmly the reins transferred to her fair hands for guidance.  Judge Dent and Miss Patty were the last of their family, except the orphan niece who had been left to their care, and as their earthly possessions would ultimately descend to her, she had been reared in the conviction that their house was her only home.

Study and travel, potent factors in the march of progress, had so enlarged the periphery of Leo’s intellectual vision, that she frequently startled her prim aunt, by the enunciation of views much too extended and cosmopolitan to fit that haughty dame’s Procrustean limits of “Southern ladyhood”.  Blessed with a discriminating governess and chaperon, who while fostering a genuine love of the beautiful, had endeavored to guard her pupil from straying into any of those fashionable “art crazes”, which in their ephemeral exaggeration approach caricatures of aestheticism, Leo became deeply imbued with the spirit of classic literature and art; and grew especially fond of the study of Greek and Roman architecture.