onds gave
her mind wings for a moment and a world to fly through. Not the world we
live in, but the world worth living in. Old sailor-stories, old scraps of
thought and dreams from nowhere pursued her, haunted her during that
delightful and tantalising moment, and then she was herself again and Miss
Pinckney was saying:

"It's a pretty view and hasn't changed since I was a child. Now, in N'York
they'd have put up skyscrapers; Lord bless you, they'd have put them up at
a _loss_ so's to seem energetic and spoil the view. That's a N'Yorker in
two words, happy so long as he's energetic and spoiling views--" Then
gazing dreamily towards the touch of blue sea. "Well, I guess the Lord
made N'Yorkers same as he made you and me. His ways are _in_scrutable and
past finding out; so'r the ways of some of his creatures."

She turned from the window, and her eye fell on the great chest by the
other window.

Going to it, she opened the lid.

It was full of old toys, mostly broken. She seemed to have forgotten the
presence of Phyl. Holding the chest's lid open, she gazed at the coloured
and futile contents.

Then she closed the lid of the chest with a sigh.

CHAPTER III

The South dines at four o'clock--at least Charleston does.

It was the old English custom and the old Irish custom, too.

In the reign of William the Conqueror people dined at eleven A.M. or was
it ten? Then, as civilisation advanced, the dinner hour stole forward. In
the time of the Georges it reached four o'clock. In Ireland, the most
conservative country on earth, some people even still sit down to table at
four--in Charleston every one does.

One would not change the custom for worlds, just as one would not change
the old box pews of St. Michael's or replace the cannon on the Battery
with modern ordinance.

Richard Pinckney did not dine at home that day. He was dining with the
Rhetts in Calhoun Street, so Miss Pinckney said as they sat down to table.
She sniffed as she said it, for the Rhetts, though one of the best
families in the town, were people not of her way of thinking. The two
Rhett girls had each a motor-car of her own and drove it--abomination!

The automobile ranked in her mind with the telephone as an invention of
the devil.

Phyl had not seen Richard Pinckney since the morning and now he was dining
out. Her heart had warmed to him at the station on the way to Vernons, and
at breakfast he had appeared to her as a quite different