"Where his papa had sent him for a more cosmopolitan knowledge of life than Louisville could afford," supplemented Alexina gaily.

"And where he wrote verses to a little dressmaker across the hall,"

said William.

"Verses?" said Alexina. "Did he write verses? I never heard about the verses."

"No?" said the son; "hasn't he ever written verses to you? Well, since I've opened the way to it, I was leading up to it all the while, why _I have_. I'll show 'em to you. I've had 'em in my pocket waiting the opportunity three days now." Which was true. He had been going for them that first day.

He produced a small card photograph, somewhat faded, which, taken in Alexina's hand, showed her a little girl's serious face, with short-cropped hair.

"She had a nice, straight little nose, anyhow," said Alexina approvingly, studying the card.

"Turn it over," said William Leroy. He had a way of commanding people.

Some day Alexina intended warring with him about it, but she turned it over now. The lines inscribed on its reverse were in a round and laboured script that, despite effort, staggered down hill.

"I wrote 'em," said w.i.l.l.y Leroy, "moi--myself, with gulped-down tears at leaving you. I've never written any since."

She was reading them.

"Out loud," he commanded.

She read them aloud. She was laughing, but she was blushing absurdly, too.

"This is Alexina and she Is a girl but she Plays like I tell her and she Cried because we had to come away And this is Alexina."

"He thinks, your son does," said Alexina, addressing herself to the Captain, "that he was a precocious person, whereas he was only--"

"Young," said the Captain.

"Lamentably egotistical," said Alexina.

"Give it to me," said w.i.l.l.y, "my picture and my feelings thereon."

"No," said the girl; "I want it."

"Yes." He said it with the King William air. She made a little mouth, but gave him the card, which he put back in his wallet and the wallet into his pocket. "You're welcome to a copy of the lines," he said.

Alexina, bestowing on him a glance of lofty disdain, departed, high-headed, into the house.

But he ran after her and stooped, that he might look into her face; was he laughing at her?

"Oh," she said, and wheeled upon him, but had to laugh too, such was the high glee behind the sweet gravity on William Leroy's countenance.

Glee there was, yet, too, something else in the dark eyes laughing at her, something unconsciously warm and caressing.

The girl ran quickly up-stairs.

And William Leroy, brought to himself, stood where she left him. The hand on the newel-post suddenly closed hard upon it, then he straightened and walked into the parlour, and, sitting down, stared at the embers of the wood fire, as one bewildered. Then his head lifted as with one who understands. On his face was a strange look and a light.

CHAPTER SIX

Alexina went up to her mother and Mrs. Leroy. Molly was lolling in a big chair in the sunshine, idly swinging the ta.s.sel of her wrapper to and fro. The shadows about her eyes were other than those lent by the sweep of her childlike lashes, and she looked wan. But she looked at peace, too. In her present state the flow of Mrs. Leroy's personal chat was entertainment. Now, there was always one central theme to Charlotte's talk, whatever the variations.

"He hasn't a bit of false pride, w.i.l.l.y hasn't," she was stating.

"After his father lost his position, those two years before the trees began paying, there's nothing w.i.l.l.y wouldn't turn his hand to. He carried a chain for the surveyors and went as guide for parties hunting and fishing in the glades."

Molly's attention sometimes wandered from these maternal confidences.

"You were Charlotte Ransome before you were married, weren't you?" she asked irrelevantly. "You used to come to New Orleans winters, didn't you? You were at a party at my Uncle Randolph's once when I was a girl and you were spoken of as a great beauty, I remember. There was a pompon head-dress too, one winter, called the Charlotte Ransome."

The Charlotte listening, only the vivacity of smile and eyes left of her beauty, the Charlotte living the obscure life of a little raw Southern town, let her needle fall, the needle she handled with the awkwardness of a craft acquired late. She was darning an old tablecloth, come down from her mother's day, that day when triumphs and adulation made up life, and when cost or reckoning was a thing she troubled not herself about. She was that Charlotte Ransome again, called up by Mrs. Garnier, the beauty, the fashion, and the belle.

"Oh," she said, "the joy of youth, the joy! Old Madame d'Arblay, the Louisville milliner, devised that pompon head-dress out of her own cleverness, and I remember my old Aunt Polly Ann Love tried to talk her down on the price. How it comes back, the intoxication of it, and the living. Drink deep, little Mab, it never offers twice. I seemed to have divined it never would be again."

The girl looked from one woman to the other. Molly still pursued this thing called adulation, and Mrs. Leroy, big-hearted, simple-souled as she was, looked yearningly back on that which was gone.

Was this all, then? Was life forever after empty, except as with Mrs.

Leroy, of duties that occupied but did not satisfy? And what of women who are neither beauties nor belles? What has life to offer them?

A vast depression came over the girl. And was this all? Both women bore witness that it was.

"I heard tell in those days," Molly was saying to Mrs. Leroy, "of a dozen men in the South you might have married. How did you come"--curiously--"in the end to marry Captain Leroy, so much older, and so quiet, and--er--"

Charlotte was too simple to resent the question, which to her meant only affectionate interest. Besides, she was an egotist, and livened under talk of herself. She had no concealment; indeed, had she been cognizant of any skeleton in the family closet, it must speedily have lost its gruesomeness to her, so constantly would she have it out, annotating its anatomy to any who showed interest.

"Because he came to us in our trouble," said Charlotte, "to mother and me when father died. He was shot, my father, you know, in a political quarrel on the street in Lexington, the year before the war. And Captain Georges came to us. We'd always known him. His father and my Uncle Spottswood Love operated the first brandy distillery in Kentucky. Captain Georges had brought me pretty things from New Orleans and Paris all my life. I meant never to marry, then; I'd been unhappy. But it turned out we were poor, and so when Georges said for me to marry him that he might care for mother and me, why--"

"Oh," breathed Alexina. It was denunciation. Certain scenes of childhood had burned into her memory, which she had interpreted later.

Molly had not loved daddy, either.

"No one was ever so good, so n.o.bly, generously good to a woman as Georges has been to me," Mrs. Leroy was saying; "and even in our poverty he and w.i.l.l.y have managed, and kept it somehow from me, and long, oh, long ago, I came to love him dearly."

The young arraigner, hearing, gazed unconvinced. She pushed the weight of her hair back off her forehead, as she always did when impatient.

"Came to love him dearly." With that mere affection which grows from a.s.sociation, and dependence and habit.

The girl sitting on the window-sill in the sunshine drew a long breath. There was more in life than these two had found; all unknowingly, they had proved it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Charlotte kept them with her the week, then Molly turned restless.