Matilda's young people, who were irresistibly drawn into the circle of
his ever ready sympathy.

The whole tale and its telling was absorbingly interesting to Caroline
Darrah Brown and she listened with enraptured attention to it all. She
repeated carefully the names of her mother's friends as they came up in
the conversation; and she was pathetically eager to know all about this
world she had come back into, from, what already seemed to her, her birth
in a strange land. Two days in this country of her mother, and the
enchantment of traditions that had been given to her unborn was already
at work with its spell!

And so they rambled around and talked, unheeding the time until the early
twilight began to fall and Mrs. Buchanan was summoned by Jeff to a
consultation in the domestic regions with the autocratic Tempie.

Left to herself, Caroline Darrah wandered back again through the rooms
from one object to another that inspired the stories. It was like
fairy-land to her and she was in a long dream of pleasure. Out of the
shadows she seemed to be drawing her wistful young mother, and hand in
hand they were going over the past together.

When it was quite deep into the twilight she sauntered back to the
crackling comfort of the major's fragrant logs. A discussion with Jeff
over his toilet had delayed the major in his bedroom and she found the
library deserted, but hospitable with firelight.

How long she had been musing and castle-building in the coals she
scarcely knew, when a step on the polished floor made her look up, and
with a little exclamation she rose to her full, slim, young height and