ere. In Molly, the bride of an hour, with
her child's face and red-brown hair and shadowy lashes, she saw a
descendant of pleasure-loving, ease-taking Southerners. Molly's
father, from what Austen had said, was the dispenser of a lavish and
improvident hospitality and a genial dweller on the edge of
bankruptcy, while the mother, a belle of the '40's, some one had told
the Blairs, seemed just the woman to marry her only child to a man
opposed to her people in creed, politics and habits--which in 1860
meant something--but son of one of the richest men in the South.

Harriet ate her supper close by her father and mother. She did not
know how to mix with these gay, incidental Southerners, and sitting
there, went on with her communings. She could explain it on the
Randolph side, but why Alexander was marrying Molly she could not
understand. Shy and self-conscious, she knew vaguely of a thing called
love. She had met it in her reading rather than seen its acting forces
anywhere about her. To be sure, her brother Austen had been engaged to
a Miss Ransome of Woodford County, a fashionable Kentucky beauty. The
Blairs were a narrowly religious people. Harriet, a school-girl then,
had stood at the window of the stately new stone house in Louisville
which the Blairs called home, and, watching the fashionable world flow
in and out of the high old brick cottage across the street, where Miss
Ransome spent much time with a great-aunt, had wondered.

But love had not proved such a factor after all. Austen's engagement
had been broken.

Harriet went back to Kentucky with the question of Alexander and Molly
still open.

A year later her father went South again. War was loudly threatening,
and he had large interests in Louisiana and Mississippi. There was a
certain sympathy and understanding between the stern, silent man and
his daughter, and he suggested that she go with him and see the child
newly born to Alexander and Molly.

But, reaching New Orleans to find his son gone to Mobile, concerning
these same interests, Mr. Blair decided to join him, and Molly being
about to leave for her father's plantation with the baby and nurse,
that she might the more rapidly convalesce, it was decided that
Harriet accompany her.

The two weeks at Cannes Brulee were strange to the girl, thus
introduced to a Southern house overflowing with guests and servants,
and she moved amid the idling and irresponsibility, the laughter and
persiflage, with a