sugar bowl if I'd let you. No, take your nose away; it's all gone;
eleven great lumps have you had, and the feast of the gods is over."

But Phyllis would not be convinced; she pushed her nose up over the
window ledge, and whinnied softly. As plainly as a horse can beg, she
begged for more, but her mistress was obdurate. Placing both hands
behind her, she drew back into the room, laughing.

"Not another lump," she called, "eleven are enough. Greedy Phyllis, to
beg for more when you know I'm in earnest. Go away and play with the
colts; you'll get no more to-day."

"You'll never make Phyllis believe that, my dear," remarked a tall,
gray-haired lady, in a pretty muslin cap, who had entered unperceived.

"Oh, yes, mother. She understands quite well. See, she's moving off
already. Phyllis knows I never break my word, and that persuasion is
quite useless," replied Pocahontas, turning to give her mother the
customary morning kiss, to place her chair before the waiter for her,
and to tell her how becoming her new cap was. The Masons never
neglected small courtesies to each other.

The branch of the Mason family still resident at the old homestead of
Lanarth had dwindled to four living representatives--Mrs. Mason, who
had not changed her name in espousing her cousin Temple Mason, of
Lanarth, and her son Berkeley, and daughters Grace and Pocahontas.
There had been another son, Temple, the younger, whose story formed one
of those sad memories which are the grim after-taste of war. All three
of the Masons had worn gray uniforms; the father had been killed in a
charge at Malvern Hill, the elder son had lost his good right arm, and
the younger had died in prison.

Of the two daughters, Grace had early fulfilled her destiny in true
Virginian fashion, by marrying a distant connection of her family, a
Mr. Royall Garnett, who had been a playmate of her brothers, and whose
plantation lay in an adjoining county. With praiseworthy conservatism,
Mrs. Garnett was duplicating the uneventful placidity of her parents'
early years, content to rule her household wisely, to love and minister
to her husband, and to devote her energies to the rearing of her
children according to time-honored precedent. Pocahontas, the youngest
of the family, was still unmarried, nay, more--still unengaged.

They had called her "Pocahontas" in obedience to the unwritten law of
southern families, which decrees that an ancestor's sin of distinction
sh