laid down her pen and put her forehead on her clasped hands. How
empty and inane these entries seemed beside this rich and eventful
twenty-four hours just passed! What had she been doing a year ago
to-day? she wondered. The lower drawer of the desk held a number of
slim diaries like the one before her. She pulled it out, took up the
last-year's volume and opened it.

"Why," she said in surprise, "I got jessamine for mother this very same
day last year!" she pondered frowning, then reached for a third and a
fourth. From these she looked up, startled. That date in her mother's
calendar called for cape jessamines. What was the fourteenth of May to
her?

She bent a slow troubled gaze about her. The room had been hers as a
child. She seemed suddenly back in that childhood, with her mother
bending over her pillow and fondling her rebellious hair. When the wind
cried for loneliness out in the dark she had sung old songs to her that
had seemed to suit a windy night: _Mary of the Wild Moor_, and _I am
Dreaming Now of Hallie_. Sad songs! Even in those pinafore years Shirley
had vaguely realized that pain lay behind the brave gay mask. Was there
something--some event--that had caused that dull-colored life and
unfulfilment? And was to-day, perhaps, its anniversary?

Her thought darted to her father who had died before her birth, on whose
gray hair had been set the greenest laurels of the Civil War. She had
always been deeply proud of his military record--had never read his name
on a page of Confederate history without a new thrill. But she had never
thought of him and her mother as actors in a passionate love-romance.
Their portraits hung together in the living-room down-stairs: the grave
middle-aged man with graying hair, and the pale proud girl with the
strange shadow in the dark eyes. The canvases had been painted in the
year of her mother's marriage. The same sadness had been in her face
then. And their marriage and his death had both fallen in midwinter. No,
this May date was not connected with him!

"Dearest, dearest!" whispered Shirley, and a slow tear drew its shining
track down her cheek. "Is there something I've never known? Is there?"

CHAPTER XXIII

UNCLE JEFFERSON'S STORY

John Valiant sat propped up on the library couch, an open magazine
unheeded on his knee. The reading-stand beside him was a litter of
letters and papers. The bow-window was open and the honeysuckle breeze
blew about him, lifting his