But something in the way of an awakening had come to him during his recent visit, and it had shocked him.  The child Peggy was a child no longer but a very charming young girl on the borderland of womanhood.  In a year or two she would be a young woman and entitled to her place in the social world.  Poor Neil Stewart, more than once upon retiring to his bedroom after one of his delightful evenings spent with Peggy, desperately ran his fingers through his curly hair and asked aloud:  “What under the sun am I to do?  I can’t leave that child vegetating here any longer, yet who will come to live with her or where shall I send her?”

But the question was still unanswered when he left Severndale and now Peggy was beginning to experience something of her father’s unrest.

October came.  Her work with Dr. Llewellyn was resumed.  Each Sunday she drove into Annapolis to old St. Ann’s with Harrison; a modest, unobtrusive little figure who attended the service and slipped away again almost unnoticed.  Indeed, if given a thought at all she was vaguely supposed to be some connection of the eminently respectable elderly woman accompanying her.  Harrison was a rather stately imposing body in her black taffeta, or black broadcloth, as the season demanded.  People did not inquire.  It was not their affair.  The rector on one or two occasions had spoken to Harrison, but Harrison had been on her dignity.  She replied politely but did not encourage intimacy and, if the truth must be confessed, Dr. Smith, rather piqued, decided that he had done his duty and would make no further advances.  This had happened some time before the beginning of this story.

In October, as usual, a number of colts were disposed of.  Some were sold to people in the adjacent towns or counties, others sent to remote purchasers who had seen them in their baby days, followed their up-bringing and training, and waited patiently for them to arrive at the stipulated age, four years, before becoming their property.  No colt was ever sold under four years of age.  This was an inviolable law of Severndale, mutually agreed upon by Dr. Llewellyn, the business manager, Shelby, the foreman, and Peggy, the mistress.

“Ain’t going to have no half-baked stock sent off this place if I have the say-so,” had been Shelby’s fiat.  “I’ve seen too many fine colts mined by being bruck too young and then sold to fools who don’t seem to sense that a horse’s backbone’s like gristle ’fore he’s turned three.  Then they load him down fit to kill him, or harness him in a way no horse could stand, or drive him off his legs, and, when he’s played out, they get back at the man who sold him to them, and like as not there’s a lawsuit afoot that the price of the colt four times over couldn’t square, to say nothing of a reputation no stock-farm can afford to have.”