tack
of homesickness, and how Mammy Juliet and every one else petted and
indulged her, are matters which need not be dwelt on. But we shall
gladly believe that she was too sensible, even at the early and tender
age of ten, to be easily spoiled.

Many foolish things have been said and written about the wax-like
quality of a child's mind; how each new impression effaces the old, and
how character in permanence is not to be looked for until the bones have
stopped growing. Yet who has not known criminals at twelve, and saints
and angels, and wise men and women--in fine, the entire gamut of
humanity--in short frocks or knee-breeches?

Ardea, child of adversity and the Paris ateliers, brought one lasting
memory up out of those early Deer Trace Manor years: she was always
immeasurably older than such infants as Mammy Juliet and Uncle Scipio.
And this also she remembered: that when these and all the others,
including her grandfather and Japheth Pettigrass, were busily leveling
all the barriers of restraint for her, she had built some of her own and
set herself the task of living within them.

I am sure she began to realize, almost at the first, that she must rise
superior to the Dabney weakness, which, as exemplified by the Major, was
ungoverned, and perhaps ungovernable, temper. At all events, she never
forgot a summer day soon after her arrival when she first saw her
grandfather transformed into a frenzied madman.

He was sitting on the wide portico, smoking his long-stemmed pipe and
directing Japheth Pettigrass, who was training the great crimson-rambler
rose that ran well up to the eaves. Ardea, herself, was on the lawn,
playing with her grandfather's latest gift, a huge, solemn-eyed Great
Dane, so she did not see the man who had dismounted at the gate and
walked up the driveway until he was handing his card to her grandfather.

When she did see him, she looked twice at him; not because he was trigly
clad in brown duck and tightly-buttoned service leggings, but because he
wore his beard trimmed to a point, after the manner of the students in
the Latin Quarter, and so was reminiscent of things freshly forsaken.

She had succeeded in making the Great Dane carry her on his back quite
all the way around the circular coleus bed when the explosion took
place. There was a startling thunderclap of fierce words from the
portico, and she slipped from the dog's back and stared wide-eyed. Her
grandfather was on his feet, towering