ered the too serious attitude he had taken towards her past. She
might laugh at it, and even resent it, but she KNEW it, remembered
it, knew that HE did, and this precious knowledge was confined to
themselves. It was in their minds when there was a pause in their more
practical and conventional conversation, and was even revealed in the
excessive care which Miss Sally later took to avert at the right moment
her mischievously smiling eyes. Once she went farther. Courtland had
just finished explaining to her a plan for substituting small farm
buildings for the usual half-cultivated garden-patches dear to the negro
field-hand, and had laid down the drawings on the table in the office,
when the young lady, leaning against it with her hands behind her, fixed
her bright gray eyes on his serious face.

"I vow and protest, co'nnle," she said, dropping into one of the quaint
survivals of an old-time phraseology peculiar to her people, "I never
allowed yo' could just give yo'self up to business, soul and body, as
yo' do, when I first met yo' that day."

"Why, what did you think me?" he asked quickly.

Miss Sally, who had a Southern aptitude for gesture, took one little
hand from behind her, twirled it above her head with a pretty air of
disposing of some airy nothing in a presumably masculine fashion, and
said, "Oh, THAT."

"I am afraid I did not impress you then as a very practical man," he
said, with a faint color.

"I thought you roosted rather high, co'nnle, to pick up many worms in
the mo'ning. But," she added with a dazzling smile, "I reckon from what
yo' said about the photograph, yo' thought I wasn't exactly what yo'
believed I ought to be, either."

He would have liked to tell her then and there that he would have been
content if those bright, beautiful eyes had never kindled with anything
but love or womanly aspiration; that that soft, lazy, caressing voice
had never been lifted beyond the fireside or domestic circle; that the
sunny, tendriled hair and pink ears had never inclined to anything but
whispered admiration; and that the graceful, lithe, erect figure, so
independent and self-contained, had been satisfied to lean only upon his
arm for support. He was conscious that this had been in his mind when he
first saw her; he was equally conscious that she was more bewilderingly
fascinating to him in her present inaccessible intelligence and
practicality.

"I confess," he said, looking into her eyes with a vague