"Sure," declared Mary Ann, "it's the air of a princess the child has."

That she should be thought a princess did not appear at all remarkable to
Honora at twelve years of age. Perdita may have had such dreams. She had
been born, she knew, in some wondrous land by the shores of the summer
seas, not at all like St. Louis, and friends and relatives had not
hesitated to remark in her hearing that she resembled--her father,--that
handsome father who surely must have been a prince, whose before-mentioned
photograph in the tortoise-shell frame was on the bureau in her little
room. So far as Randolph Leffingwell was concerned, photography had not
been invented for nothing. Other records of him remained which Honora had
likewise seen: one end of a rose-covered villa--which Honora thought was
a wing of his palace; a coach and four he was driving, and which had
chanced to belong to an Englishman, although the photograph gave no
evidence of this ownership. Neither Aunt Mary nor Uncle Tom had ever
sought--for reasons perhaps obvious--to correct the child's impression of
an extraordinary paternity.

Aunt Mary was a Puritan of Southern ancestry, and her father had been a
Presbyterian minister, Uncle Tom was a member of the vestry of a church
still under Puritan influences. As a consequence for Honora, there were
Sunday afternoons--periods when the imaginative faculty, in which she was
by no means lacking, was given full play. She would sit by the hour in
the swing Uncle Tom had hung for her under the maple near the lattice,
while castles rose on distant heights against blue skies. There was her
real home, in a balconied chamber that overlooked mile upon mile of
rustling forest in the valley; and when the wind blew, the sound of it
was like the sea. Honora did not remember the sea, but its music was
often in her ears.