cried when you chose
Miss Shirley Queen of Beauty, I was that glad! She was a lot the
prettiest girl there. Though I like your looks right much too, Miss
Fargo," she added tactfully.

"Oh, Mr. Valiant!" Rickey called after them as the car started. "Now
you're at Damory Court, are you going to let us children keep on playing
up at the Hemlocks?"

"Well I should _think_ so!" he answered. "Play there all the time, if
you like."

"Oh, thank you," said Rickey, radiant. "And there won't be any snakes
there now, for you've cleared all the underbrush away."

As they sped on, Katharine's cheek had a faintly heightened color. But,
"What a deliciously odd child!" she laughed.

"She's a character," he said. "She worships the ground Miss Dandridge
walks on. There's a good reason for it. You must get Miss Chalmers to
tell you the story."

Where the Red Road stretched level before them, he threw the throttle
open for a long rush through the thymy-scented air. The light, late
afternoon breeze drew by them, sweeping back Katharine's graceful
sinuous veil and spraying them with odors of clover and sunny fruit.
They passed orchard clumps bending with young apples, boundless aisles
of green, young-tasseled corn and shadowy groves that smelled of fern
and sassafras, opening out into more sun-lighted vistas overarched by
the intense penetrable blue of the June sky.

John Valiant had never seemed to her so wholly good to see, with his
waving hair ruffling in their flight and the westerning sun shining
redly on his face. Midway of this spurt he looked at her to say: "Did
you ever know a more beautiful countryside? See how the pink-and-yellow
of those grain fields fades into the purple of the hills. Very few
painters have ever captured a tint like that. It's like raspberries
crushed in curdled milk."

"I've quite lost my heart to it all," she said, her voice jolting with
the speed of their course. "It's a perfect pastoral ... so different
from our terrific city pace.... Of course it must be a trifle dull at
times ... seeing the same people always ... and without the theater and
the opera and the whirl about one--but ... the kind of life one reads
about ... in the novels of the South, you know ... I suppose one doesn't
realize that it actually exists until one comes to a Southern place like
this. And the negro servants! How odd it must be to have a white-headed
old darky in a brass-buttoned swallow-tail for a butler! So picturesque!
A