Square, Lady Alice
Mordaunt was pouring tea, and talking as usual the same trifling
commonplaces that had on a previous occasion excited her cousin's
disdain. Opposite her sat her mother, Lady Fletcher, a perfect model of
the well-bred English matron, while Opal Ledoux, in the daintiest and
fluffiest of summer costumes, was curled up like a kitten in a corner of
the window-seat, apparently engrossed in a book, but in reality watching
the passers-by.

From her childhood up she had lived in a Castle of Dreams, which she had
peopled with the sort of men and women that suited her own fanciful
romantic ideas, and where she herself was supposed to lie asleep until
her ideal knight, the Prince Charming of the story, came across land
and sea to storm the Castle and wake her with a kiss.

It was made up of moonbeams and rays of sunshine and
rainbow-gleams--this dream--woven by fairy fingers into so fragile a
cobweb that it seemed absurd to think it could stand the winds and
torrents of Grown-Up Land; but Opal, in spite of her eighteen years, was
still awaiting the coming of her ideal knight, though the stage setting
of the drama, and her picture of just how the Prince Charming of her
dreams was to look, and what he would say, had changed materially with
the passing of the years.

If sometimes she wove strange lines of tragedy throughout the dreams,
out of the threads of shadow that flitted across the sunshine of her
life, she did not reject them. She felt they belonged there and did not
shrink, even when her young face paled at the curious self-pity the
passing of the thought invoked.

Hers was a strange mixture, made up of an unusual intermingling of many
bloods. Born in New Orleans, of a father who was a direct descendant of
the early French settlers of Louisiana, and of a Creole mother, who
might have traced her ancestry back to one of the old grandees of Spain,
she yet clung with a jealous affection to the land of her birth and
called herself defiantly "a thorough-bred American!" Her mother had died
in giving her birth, and her father, while she was still too young to
remember, had married a fair Englishwoman who had tried hard to be a
mother to the strange little creature whose blood leaped and danced
within her veins with all the fire and romance of foreign suns. Gay and
pleasure-mad as she usually appeared, there was always the shadow of a
heartache in her eye, and one felt the possibility of a tragedy in her
nature.