s
story of the Gold Bug, and now, unable to read any more by the light from
the window, she came to the fire, curled herself on the hearthrug and
continued the adventures of the treasure-seekers by the light of the
burning turf.

What a pretty face it was, seen by the full warm glow of the turf, and
what a perfectly shaped head! It was not the face and head of a Berknowles
as you could easily have perceived had you compared it with the portraits
in the picture gallery, but of a Mascarene.

Phyl's mother had been a Mascarene, a member of the old, adventurous
family that settled in Virginia when Virginia was a wilderness and spread
its branches through the Carolinas when the Planter was king of the South.
Red hair had run among the Mascarenes, red hair and a wild spirit that
brooked no contradiction and knew no fear. Phyl had inherited something of
this restless and daring spirit. She had run away from the Rottingdean
Academy for the Daughters of the Nobility and Gentry where she had been
sent at the age of twelve; making her way back to Ireland like a homing
pigeon, she had turned up one morning at breakfast time, quite unshaken by
her experiences of travel and with the announcement that she did not like
school.

Had her mother been alive the traveller would have been promptly returned,
but Phyl's father, good, easy man, was too much taken up with agrarian
disputes, hunting, and the affairs of country life to bother much about
the small affair of his daughter's future and education. He accepted her
rejection of his plans, wrote a letter of apology to the Rottingdean
Academy, and hired a governess for her. She wore out three in eighteen
months, declared herself dissatisfied with governesses and competent to
finish the process of educating and polishing herself.

This she did with the aid of all the books in the library, old Dunn, the
rat-catcher of Arranakilty, a man profoundly versed in the habits of
rodents and birds, Larry the groom, and sundry others of low estate but
high intelligence in matters of sport and woodcraft.

Now it might be imagined from the foregoing that hardihood,
self-assertion, and other unpleasant characteristics would be indicated in
the manner and personality of this lover of freedom and rebel against
restraint. Not at all. She was a most lovable and clinging person, when
she could get hold of anything worth clinging to, with a mellifluous Irish
voice at once soothing and distracting, a voice