of the drama, and her picture of just how the Prince Charming of her
dreams was to look, and what he would say, had changed materially with
the passing of the years.

If sometimes she wove strange lines of tragedy throughout the dreams,
out of the threads of shadow that flitted across the sunshine of her
life, she did not reject them. She felt they belonged there and did not
shrink, even when her young face paled at the curious self-pity the
passing of the thought invoked.

Hers was a strange mixture, made up of an unusual intermingling of many
bloods. Born in New Orleans, of a father who was a direct descendant of
the early French settlers of Louisiana, and of a Creole mother, who
might have traced her ancestry back to one of the old grandees of Spain,
she yet clung with a jealous affection to the land of her birth and
called herself defiantly "a thorough-bred American!" Her mother had died
in giving her birth, and her father, while she was still too young to
remember, had married a fair Englishwoman who had tried hard to be a
mother to the strange little creature whose blood leaped and danced
within her veins with all the fire and romance of foreign suns. Gay and
pleasure-mad as she usually appeared, there was always the shadow of a
heartache in her eye, and one felt the possibility of a tragedy in her
nature. In fact one felt intuitively sorry--almost afraid--for her lest
her daring, adventurous spirit should lead her too close to the
precipice along the rocky pathway of life.

She was thinking many strange thoughts as she sat looking out of the
window. Her English cousins, related to her only through her stepmother,
yet called kin for courtesy's sake, had given up trying to understand
her complexities, as she had likewise given up trying to explain