studiedly unhurried departure.

"David Kildare translates courtship into strange modern terms," remarked
the major as he led Caroline into the library and seated her in Mrs.
Matilda's low chair near his own.

"The roses are blooming this morning, my dear," he said, looking
with delight at the soft color in her cheeks and the stars in her
black-lashed, violet eyes. A shaft of sunlight glinted in the gold of her
hair which was coiled low and from which little tendrils curled down on
her white neck.

She was very dainty and lovely, was Caroline Darrah Brown, with the
loveliness of a windflower and young with the innocent youngness of an
April day. She was slightly different from any girl the major had ever
known and he observed her type with the greatest interest.

She had been tutored and trained and French-convented and specialized by
adepts in the inculcating of every air and grace with which the women of
vaster wealth are expected to be equipped. Money and the girl had been
the ruling passions of Peters Brown's life and the one had been all for
the serving purposes of the other. It had been the one aim of his
existence to bring to a perfect flowering the new-born bud his southern
wife had left him, and he had succeeded. Yet she seemed so slight a
woman-thing to be bearing the burden of a great wealth and a great
loneliness that the major's eyes grew very tender as he asked:

"What is it, clear, a crumpled rose-leaf?"

"Major," she answered as her slender fingers opened and closed a book on