. She was in
deep water, but very close to the shore, so close that he could see
the leaves on the trees quivering and shimmering in the river breeze
and the late summer sunlight. Over there, as the crow flies, lay the
River Swamp, and Neptune's gray, deserted cabin. They had been his
refuge. No other place, no other woods in all the world could quite
take their place, or be like them. And he knew there would be many a
day when he must ache with homesick longing for the coast country,
for the tide-water, and the jessamines, and the moon above the
pines, and the scent of the bay in flower on summer nights. The
world was opening her wide spaces. But the Carolina coast was
_home_.

"I wish," said Peter, and his chin quivered, "I wish there were some
one thing that typified you, something of you I could take with me
wherever I go. I wish you had a spirit I could see, and know."

Out from the shore-line, where the earliest golden-rod was just
beginning to show that it intended to blossom by and by, and the
ironweed was purple, and the wild carrot was white and lacy, and the
orange-red milkweed was about ready to close her house for the
season, came fluttering with a quick, bold sureness the gallantest
craft of all the fairy sail-boats of the sky, hovered for a bright
second over the steamer's rail, and scudded for the other shore.

Peter Champneys straightened his shoulders. Youth and courage and
hope flashed into his wistful face, and brightened his eyes that
followed the Red Admiral.

CHAPTER VIII

CINDERELLA

It wasn't a pleasant house, being of a dingy, bilious-yellow
complexion, with narrow window eyes, and a mean slit of a doorway
for a mouth; not sinister, but common, stupid, and uninteresting. If
one should happen to be a house-psychologist, one would know that
behind the Nottingham lace curtains looped back with soiled red
ribbons, was all the tawdry, horrible junk that clutters such
houses, even as mental junk clutters the minds of the people who
have to live in them. One knew that the people who dwelt in that
house didn't know how to live, how to think, or how to cook; and
that if by any chance a larger life, a real thought, or a bit of
good cooking confronted them, they would probably reject it with
suspicion.

The elderly gentleman in white linen who made acquaintance with this
particular house on a very sultry noon in early August, hesitated
before he rang the bell. He glanced over his should