afternoons, houses of old English solidity yet with the Southern touch of
deep verandas and the hint of palm trees in their jealously walled
gardens.

"Oh, how beautiful!" said Phyl. She stopped, looked about her, and then
gazed away down the street. It was as though the old stately street--and
surely the Street of Other Days might be its name--had been waiting for
her all her life, waiting for her to turn that corner leading from the
commonplace station, waiting to greet her like the ghost of some friend of
childhood. Surely she knew it! Like the recollection of a dream once
dreamed, it lay before her with its walled gardens, its vaguely familiar
houses, its sunlight and placidity.

Pinckney, proud of his native town and pleased at this appreciation of it,
stood by without speaking, watching the girl who seemed to have forgotten
his existence for a moment. Her head was raised as if she were inhaling
the sea wind lazily blowing from the Battery, and bearing with it stray
scents from the gardens by the way.

Then she came back to herself, and they walked on.

"It's just as if I knew the place," said she, "and yet I never remember
seeing anything like it before."

"I've felt that way sometimes about places," said Pinckney. "It seemed to
me that I knew Paris quite well when I went there, though I'd never been
there before. Charleston is pretty English, anyway, and maybe it's that
that makes it seem familiar. But I'm glad you like it. You like it, don't
you?"

"Like it!" said she. "I should think I did--It's more than liking--I love
it."

He laughed.

"Better than Dublin?"

It was her turn to laugh.

"I never loved Dublin." She turned her head to glance at a peep of garden
showing through a wrought iron gate. "Oh, Dublin!--don't talk to me about
it here. I want to keep on feeling I'm here really and that there's
nowhere else."

"There isn't," said he, disclosing for the first time in his life, and
quite unconsciously, his passion for the place where he had been born.
"There's nowhere else but Charleston worth anything--I don't know what it
is about, but it's so."

They were passing a wall across whose top peeped an elbow of ivy geranium.
It was as though the unseen garden beyond, tired of constraint and
drowsily stretching, had disclosed this hint of a geranium coloured arm.

Pinckney paused at a wrought iron gate and opened it.

"This is Vernons," said he.

CHAPTER II

A grosbeak was singing i