The colt raised his head, whinnied aloud as though in denial and stamped one deer-like, unshod fore-hoof as though to emphasize his protest; then he again slid his head back into the arms as if their slender roundness encompassed all his little world.

“You old dear!” exclaimed the girl softly, adding:  “Eh, but it’s a beautiful world!  A wonderful world,” and broke into the lilting refrain of “Wonderful world” and sang it through in a voice of singularly, haunting sweetness.  But the words were not those of the popular song.  They had been written and set to its air by Peggy’s tutor.

She seemed to forget everything else, though she continued to mechanically run light, sensitive fingers down the velvety muzzle so close to her face, and semi-consciously reach forth the other hand to caress the head of a superb wolfhound which, upon the first sweet notes, had risen from where she lay not far off to listen, thrusting an insinuating nose under her arm.  She seemed to float away with her song, off, off across the sloping, greening fields to the broad, blue reaches of Bound Bay, all a-glitter in the morning sunlight.

She was seated in the crotch of a snake-fence running parallel with the road which ended in a curve toward the east and vanished in a thin-drawn perspective toward the west.  There was no habitation, or sign of human being near.  The soft March wind, with its thousand earthy odors and promises of a Maryland springtide, swept across the bay, stirring her dark hair, brushed up from her forehead in a natural, wavy pompadour, and secured by a barrette and a big bow of dark red ribbon, the long braid falling down her back tied by another bow of the same color.  The forehead was broad and exceptionally intellectual.  The eyebrows, matching the dark hair, perfectly penciled.  The nose straight and clean-cut as a Greek statue’s.  The chin resolute as a boy’s.  The teeth white and faultless.  And the eyes?  Well, Peggy Stewart’s eyes sometimes made people smile, sometimes almost weep, and invariably brought a puzzled frown to their foreheads.  They were the oddest eyes ever seen.  Peggy herself often laughed and said: 

“My eyes seem to perplex people worse than the elephant perplexed the ‘six blind men of Hindustan’ who went to see him.  No two people ever pronounce them the same color, yet each individual is perfectly honest in his belief that they are black, or dark brown, or dark blue, or deep gray, or sea green.  Maybe Nature designed me for a chameleon but changed her mind when she had completed my eyes.”

Peggy Stewart would hardly have been called a beautiful girl gauged by conventional standards.  Her features were not regular enough for perfection, the mouth perhaps a trifle too large, but she was “mightily pleasin’ fer to study ’bout,” old Mammy insisted when the other servants were talking about her baby.

“Oh, yes,” conceded Martha Harrison, the only white woman besides Peggy herself upon the plantation.  “Oh, yes, she’s pleasing enough, but if her mother had lived she’d never in this world a-been allowed to run wild as a boy, a-getting tanned as black as a—­a, darky.”