George Hanbury was Honora’s cousin, and she did not deem his admiration a subject fit for discussion with Bridget.

“Sure,” declared Mary Ann, “it’s the air of a princess the child has.”

That she should be thought a princess did not appear at all remarkable to Honora at twelve years of age.  Perdita may have had such dreams.  She had been born, she knew, in some wondrous land by the shores of the summer seas, not at all like St. Louis, and friends and relatives had not hesitated to remark in her hearing that she resembled—­her father,—­that handsome father who surely must have been a prince, whose before-mentioned photograph in the tortoise-shell frame was on the bureau in her little room.  So far as Randolph Leffingwell was concerned, photography had not been invented for nothing.  Other records of him remained which Honora had likewise seen:  one end of a rose-covered villa—­which Honora thought was a wing of his palace; a coach and four he was driving, and which had chanced to belong to an Englishman, although the photograph gave no evidence of this ownership.  Neither Aunt Mary nor Uncle Tom had ever sought—­for reasons perhaps obvious—­to correct the child’s impression of an extraordinary paternity.

Aunt Mary was a Puritan of Southern ancestry, and her father had been a Presbyterian minister, Uncle Tom was a member of the vestry of a church still under Puritan influences.  As a consequence for Honora, there were Sunday afternoons—­periods when the imaginative faculty, in which she was by no means lacking, was given full play.  She would sit by the hour in the swing Uncle Tom had hung for her under the maple near the lattice, while castles rose on distant heights against blue skies.  There was her real home, in a balconied chamber that overlooked mile upon mile of rustling forest in the valley; and when the wind blew, the sound of it was like the sea.  Honora did not remember the sea, but its music was often in her ears.

She would be aroused from these dreams of greatness by the appearance of old Catherine, her nurse, on the side porch, reminding her that it was time to wash for supper.  No princess could have had a more humble tiring-woman than Catherine.

Honora cannot be unduly blamed.  When she reached the “little house under the hill” (as Catherine called the chamber beneath the eaves), she beheld reflected in the mirror an image like a tall, white flower that might indeed have belonged to a princess.  Her hair, the colour of burnt sienna, fell evenly to her shoulders; her features even then had regularity and hauteur; her legs, in their black silk stockings, were straight; and the simple white lawn frock made the best of a slender figure.  Those frocks of Honora’s were a continual source of wonder and sometimes of envy—­to Aunt Mary’s friends; who returned from the seaside in the autumn, after a week among the fashions in Boston or New York, to find Honora in the latest models, and better dressed than their own children.  Aunt Mary made no secret of the methods by which these seeming miracles were performed, and showed Cousin Eleanor Hanbury the fashion plates in the English periodicals.  Cousin Eleanor sighed.