a superb bow toward the drawing-room and
in tones stiffly magnificent, he announced, "Mistah Calvin Blake." It
was excellently done, but I knew he had rehearsed the "Mistah."

Then a woman rose from one of the deep old chairs to offer me her hand,
and a soft quick laugh came as she perceived my difficulty, for my one
hand held the roses. These she gathered gracefully into her left hand,
while her right fell into mine with a swift little pressure as she bade
me welcome.

"Clem has told me of you, Mr. Blake. I feel that you are one of us. Let
me thank you at once for the consideration you have shown him."

In the half light I hesitated awkwardly enough to speak her name, for I
felt that this could not be the mother of Little Miss. Rather was it the
daughter herself. I stammered words that must have revealed my
uncertainty, for again she laughed, and then she ordered lights.

Clem came soft-footedly with a branching candelabra, which he placed on
the round-topped old table by which she had been sitting. She moved a
step to where the soft lights glowed up into her face, and with mock
seriousness stood to be surveyed fairly.

"There, Mr. Blake! You see I confess all my years."

And I saw the truth, that she loitered gracefully among the vague and
pleasant fifties. But then she did a thing which would have been
injudicious in most women of her years. Her hand, still holding my
roses, went up to her face, and her cheek glowed dusky and pink against
the yellow petals. I saw that she rightly appraised her own daring and
felt free to say:--

"You _see_! My confusion was inevitable. Not one of those candles can be
spared if I am to believe you are Miss Caroline."

Again she laughed, revealing now a girlish freshness in the small mouth,
that had somehow lingered to belie the deeper, graver lines about her
dark eyes. As she still regarded me with that smiling, waiting lift of
the short upper lip, I called out:--

"More lights, Clem! I need all you have."

Whereat Miss Caroline fell into her chair with a marvellous blush, an
undeniable darkening of the pink on cheeks that were in texture like the
finest, sheerest lawn.

Never thereafter could I refuse credence to tales, of which many came to
me, exposing Miss Caroline as an able and relentless coquette. Nor
could I fail to understand how the late Colonel Jere Lansdale would have
found need to be a duellist after he became her lover, even had he
aforetime been unskilled