me kiss it good-by," she
said.

Her back was to them both and again she laid her head in the crook of
her arm. Her breath came softly, so very softly that what time it died
away neither of the watchers knew.

But when her father again touched her forehead it was quite cold, and he
felt as though another baby had been sent away to be hidden out in the
rain.

I

THE PINES

CHAPTER I

In the far south of the United States, where through the winter months
the sun holds in warmth the blue encircling sky, opening the buds of the
roses in December, where palmetto and white sand meet deep green swamp
and heavily scented magnolia, there flows a great river. From its narrow
source it deepens and widens until toward the end of its course it
becomes an estuary, and for many miles dwellers on one side can dimly
distinguish the contour of the opposite shore. The dwellers, as it
happens, are not many, and the little boat that makes its daily trip to
and from the busy city at the river's mouth is not overburdened with
freight or passengers. It zigzags from shore to shore, stopping at one
port for timber, at another to land an itinerant preacher, at a third to
receive a fragrant load of oranges or grapefruit destined for a market
in the north.

Merryvale is one of the oldest and most important of its stops. As long
as the state has had a history there has been a Merryvale living on the
river bank. In the days when the alligators climbed up the long wharf to
sun themselves, and the moccasins dropped from the overhanging trees
into the stream, the Merryvales owned thousands of acres at the water's
edge and other thousands back in the pine forests. Then there was a
Merryvale in Congress and another in the State Senate, while scores of
slaves tilled the land and tended the cherished orange groves. But with
the passing of time the alligators slipped from the wharf, the moccasins
retreated to where gunshots were less frequent, and vast stretches of
pines and of river-front passed into other hands.

Nevertheless, in the year 1910, when Lee Merryvale came back from
college, there was astonishingly little apparent change in the old
estate. To be sure, the timber had been depleted, acres of pines had
been shipped down the river to some sawmill; and, worse, noble trees had
been gashed in the trunks, their lifeblood drawn from them, drop by
drop, and then left to decay and fall. But the hyacinth still choked the
river nea