turned to face a man who had come in with the unannounced surety of a
member of the household. He was tall, broad and dark, and his
knickerbockers were splashed with mud and covered with clinging burrs and
pine-needles. One arm was lashed to his side with a silk sling and he
held a huge bunch of glowing red berries in his free hand. They were
branches of the red, coral-strung buck bushes and Caroline had never seen
them before. Their gorgeousness fairly took her breath and she exclaimed
with the ingenuous delight of a child.

"How lovely, how lovely!" she cried as she stretched out her hands for
them. "I never saw any before. Do they grow here?"

"Yes," answered the man with a gleam of amusement in his dark eyes, "yes,
they came from Seven Oaks. The fields are full of them now. Do you want
them?" And as he spoke he laid the bunch in her arms.

"And they smell woodsy and piny and delicious. Thank you! I--they are
lovely. I--" She paused in wild confusion, looked around the room as if
in search of some one, and ended by burying her face in the berries. "I
don't know where Major Buchanan is," she murmured helplessly.

"Well, it doesn't matter," he said with a comforting smile as he came up
beside her on the rug. "They'll introduce us when they come. I'm Andrew
Sevier and the berries are yours, so what matter?"

"Oh," said Caroline Darrah in an awed voice, and as she spoke she raised
her head from the wood flowers and her eyes to his face, "oh, are you
really Andrew Sevier?"

"Yes, _really_," he answered with another smile and a slightly puzzled