o him, who was in no wise accustomed to
indifference in women.

At twilight he went to the Chestnut Ridge, but Katrine was not there,
nor did she come. The following day he went again with a similar
resulting. The third day he saw her about noon on the river-bank, and
she waved her hand to him in a cavalier fashion, disappearing into a
small copse of dogwood, not to reappear. The thing had become amusing.

During this time he saw neither Dermott McDermott nor the new overseer,
whom he learned was at Marlton on affairs concerning a sawmill.

The fourth day after his meeting with Katrine a message from the great
doctor gave him the dignity of a mission, and he rode to the old lodge
to show her the letter, which said that Dr. Johnston would be at Ravenel
soon.

There was eagerness in his gait and eyes as he mounted his horse, and as
he rode down the carriageway standing in his stirrups, waving his cap to
his mother with a "Tallyho to the hounds," he had never looked handsomer
nor had more of an air of carrying all before him, as was right, she
thought, for a Ravenel.

The old gate-lodge on the Ravenel place stands on the north branch of
the road which leads to Three Poplar Inn. It is built of pale-colored
English brick and gray stones, and runs upward to the height of two
stories, with broad doorways and wide windows peeping through ivy which
covers the place from foundation to roof.

Frank remembered it as a drear-looking, lonesome place during the
occupancy of the former incumbent. Instead, he found a reclaimed garden;
hedges of laurel, trim and straight; old-fashioned flowers, snowballs,
gillybells, great pink-and-white peonies; and over the front on
trellises, by the gate and doorway, scrambles of scarlet roses against
the green and the ivied walls.

In the doorway Nora O'Grady, a short, wide woman of fifty or thereabout,
was singing at a spinning-wheel. She had a kind, yellow face with high
cheek-bones, and dark eyes which seemed darker by reason of the snowy
hair showing under a mob cap. Her chin was square and pointed upward
like old Mother Hubbard's, and she could talk of batter-cakes or home
rule with humorous volubility, and smoke a pipe with the manner of a
condescending duchess.

She had, as Frank found afterward, an excellent gift at anecdote, but a
clipping pronunciation of English by reason of having spoken nothing but
the Erse until she was grown. Added to this was an entirely illogical
ignorance