t'll be Miss Honora next, and George Hanbury here
to-day with his eye through a knothole in the fence, out of his head for
a sight of ye."

George Hanbury was Honora's cousin, and she did not deem his admiration
a subject fit for discussion with Bridget.

"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.

She would be aroused from these dreams of greatness by the appearance of
old Catherine, her nurse, on the side porch, reminding her that it
was time to wash for supper. No princess could have had a more humble
tiring-woman than Catherine.

Honora cannot be unduly blamed. When she reached the "little house
under the hill" (as Catherine called the chamber beneath t