a--you know a--a carpetbagger. Three of her Darrah grandfathers have
been governors of this state; just think about them and don't talk about
her father or any carpet--you know. Please be good to her!"

"Be good to her," exclaimed David heartily, "just watch me! I am loving
her already for making you so happy by this down-from-the-sky drop, Mrs.
Matilda. And we'll all be careful about the carpetbags; won't even
mention a rug; lots of talk can be got out of the dead governors I'm
thinking. My welcome's getting more enthusiastic every moment. When can I
hand it to her?"

"She's resting now and I think she ought to be quiet for to-day, because
she has been under a strain," answered Mrs. Buchanan as she glanced
tenderly at a closed door across the hall. "Oh, I'm so glad you think you
are going to love her in spite of--of--"

"The Brown graft on the Darrah family tree?" finished David quizzically.
His eyes danced with delighted amusement across her puffs at the major as
he added, "Must have been silversmiths dangling on most of his ancestral
branches, judging from his propensity for making dollars; a million or
two, stocks, bonds, any kind of flimflam,--eh, Major?"

"Yes," answered the major as he blew a ring of smoke into the air, "yes,
just about that; any kind of flimflam. And I can not conceive of Peters
Brown rejoicing at having thirty thousand of those dollars put into an In
Memoriam to the women who sniffed at him and his carpetbags for a good
twenty years after the war. But the child doesn't take any of that in.
Those were twenty rich years he put in in reconstructing us, but when he
took those same heavy carpetbags North he took Mary Caroline Darrah, the
prettiest woman in the county with him. This girl--as I have said before,