uggests its morning
baptism of rose water. Such a dainty white hand! I always bend over
and kiss it whenever I have the chance, trying my best to be the
gallant I know she would like me to be.

After the little ceremony of my salutation was over I handed her to a
seat, still holding her finger-tips, bowing low just as her own
cavaliers used to do in the days when she had half the County at her
feet. I love these make-believe ceremonies when I am with her--and
then again I truly think she would not be so happy without them. This
over I took my place opposite so I could watch her face and the smiles
playing across it--that face which the Colonel always said reminded
him of "Summer roses a-bloom in October."

We talked of her journey and of how she had stood the cold and how
reluctant she had been at first to leave Carter Hall, especially at
the Christmas season, and of the Colonel (not a word, of course, about
the encounter with Klutchem--no one would have dared breathe a word of
that to her), and then of the scrap of a pickaninny she had brought
with her.

"Isn't he too amusing? I brought him up as much to help dear Chad as
for any other reason. But he is incorrigible at times and I fear I
shall have to send him back to his mother. I thought the livery might
increase his self-respect, but it only seems to have turned his head.
He doesn't obey me at all, and is so forgetful. Chad is the only one
of whom, I think, he is at all afraid."

A knock now sounded in the hall and I could hear the shuffling of
Jim's feet, and the swinging back of the door. Then Fitz's card was
brought in--not on the silver tray this time, but clutched in the
monkey paw of the pickaninny.

Aunt Nancy looked at him with a certain well-assumed surprise and drew
back from the proffered card.

"James, is that the way to bring me a card? Have I not told you
often----"

The boy looked at her, his face in a tangle of emotions. "De _Pan_!
Fo' Gord, Mist'iss, I done forgot dat pan," and with a spring he was
out again, returning with Fitz's pasteboard on the silver tray,
closely followed by that gentleman himself, who was shaking with
laughter over the incident.

"One of your body-guard, Aunt Nancy?" said Fitz, as he bent over and
kissed her hand. It was astonishing how easily Fitz fell into these
same old-time customs when he was with the dear lady--he, of all men.

"No, dear friend, one of the new race of whom I am trying to make a
good servant