tower and the solitary grave in the churchyard (which was
that of a Southern soldier who had fallen in the Battle of Dinwiddie),
was the oblong wooden rectory in which Gabriel Pendleton had lived since
he had exchanged his sword for a prayer-book and his worn Confederate
uniform for a surplice. The church, which was redeemed from
architectural damnation by its sacred cruciform and its low ivied
buttresses where innumerable sparrows nested, cast its shadow, on clear
days, over the beds of bleeding hearts and lilies-of-the-valley in the
neglected garden, to the quaint old house, with its spreading wings, its
outside chimneys, and its sloping shingled roof, from which five
dormer-windows stared in a row over the slender columns of the porch.
The garden had been planned in the days when it was easy to put a dozen
slaves to uprooting weeds or trimming flower beds, and had passed in
later years to the breathless ministrations of negro infants, whose
experience varied from the doubtful innocence of the crawling age to the
complete sophistication of six or seven years. Dandelion and wire-grass
rioted, in spite of their earnest efforts, over the crooked path from
the porch, and periwinkle, once an intruder from the churchyard, spread
now in rank disorder down the terraced hillside on the left, where a
steep flight of steps fell clear to the narrow cross street descending
gradually into the crowded quarters of the town. Directly in front of
the porch on either side of the path grew two giant paulownia trees,
royal at this season in a mantle of violet blossoms, and it was under
their arching boughs that the girls stopped when they had entered the
garden. Ever since Virginia could remember, she had heard threats of
cutting down the paulownias because of the litter the falling petals
made in the spring, and ever since she could lisp at all she had begged
her father to spare them for the sake of the enormous roots, into which
she had loved to cuddle and hide.

"If I were ever to go away, I believe they would cut down these trees,"
she said now a little wistfully, but she was not thinking of the
paulownias.

"Why should they when they give such splendid shade? And, besides, they
wouldn't do anything you didn't like for worlds."

"Oh, of course they wouldn't, but as soon as I was out of sight they
might persuade themselves that I liked it," answered Virginia, with a
tender laugh. Though she was not by nature discerning, there were