For an hour Peggy did the honors of the beautiful home, Jerome, the old butler, who had been “Massa Neil’s body servant” before he entered the Academy at eighteen, where body servants had no place, hovering around, solicitous of his master’s comfort; Harrison making a hundred and one excuses to come into the room; Mammy Lucy, with the privileges of an old servant making no excuses at all but bobbing in and out whenever she saw fit.

Luncheon was soon served in the wonderful old dining-room, one side of which was entirely of glass giving upon a broad piazza overlooking Round Bay.  From this room the view was simply entrancing and Neil Stewart, as he sat at the table at which Peggy was presiding with such grace and dignity, felt that life was certainly worth while when one could look up and encounter a pair of such soft brown eyes regarding him with such love and joy, and see such ripe, red lips part in such carefree, happy smiles.

“Jerome, don’t forget Daddy Neil’s sauce.

“Yes, missie, lamb.  I knows—­I knows.  Cynthy, she done got it made to de very top-notch pint,” answered Jerome, hurrying away upon noiseless feet and in all his immaculate whiteness from the crown of his white woolly head to his duck uniform, for the Severndale servants wore the uniforms of the mess-hall rather than the usual household livery.  Neil Stewart could not abide “cit’s rigs.”  Moreover, in spite of the long absences of the master, everything about the place was kept up in ship-shape order; Harrison and Mammy Lucy cooperated with Jerome in looking well to this.

“Now, Daddy,” cried Peggy happily when luncheon ended, “come out to the stables and paddock; I’ve a hundred things to show you.”

“A stable and a paddock for an old salt like me,” laughed her father.  “I wonder if I shall know a horse’s hock from his withers?  Yet it does seem good to see them, and smell the grass and woods and know it’s all mine and that you are mine,” he cried, slipping his arm through hers and pacing off with her.  “Some day,” he added, “I am coming here to settle down with you to enjoy it all, and when I do I mean to let four legs carry me whenever there is the least excuse for so doing.  My own have done enough pacing of the quarter-deck to have earned that indulgence.”

“And won’t it be just—­paradise,” cried Peggy rapturously.

They were now nearing the paddock.  To one side was a long row of little cottages occupied by the stable hands’ families.  Mr. Stewart paused and smiled, for out of each popped a funny little black woolly head to catch a glimpse of “Massa Captain,” as all the darkies on the place called him.

“Good Lord, where do they all come from, Peggy?  Have they all been born since my last visit?  There were not so many here then.”

“Not quite all,” answered Peggy laughing.  “Most of them were here before that, though there are some new arrivals either in the course of nature or new help.  You see the business is growing, Daddy, and I’ve had to take on new hands.”