not
been invented for nothing. Other records of him remained which Honora had
likewise seen: one end of a rose-covered villa--which Honora thought was
a wing of his palace; a coach and four he was driving, and which had
chanced to belong to an Englishman, although the photograph gave no
evidence of this ownership. Neither Aunt Mary nor Uncle Tom had ever
sought--for reasons perhaps obvious--to correct the child's impression of
an extraordinary paternity.

Aunt Mary was a Puritan of Southern ancestry, and her father had been a
Presbyterian minister, Uncle Tom was a member of the vestry of a church
still under Puritan influences. As a consequence for Honora, there were
Sunday afternoons--periods when the imaginative faculty, in which she was
by no means lacking, was given full play. She would sit by the hour in
the swing Uncle Tom had hung for her under the maple near the lattice,
while castles rose on distant heights against blue skies. There was her
real home, in a balconied chamber that overlooked mile upon mile of
rustling forest in the valley; and when the wind blew, the sound of it
was like the sea. Honora did not remember the sea, but its music was
often in her ears.

She would be aroused from these dreams of greatness by the appearance of
old Catherine, her nurse, on the side porch, reminding her that it was
time to wash for supper. No princess could have had a more humble
tiring-woman than Catherine.

Honora cannot be unduly blamed. When she reached the "little house under
the hill" (as Catherine called the chamber beneath the eaves), she beheld
reflected in the mirror an image like a tall, white flower that might
indeed have belonged to a princess. Her hair, the colour of burnt sienna,
fell evenly to her shoulders; her features even then had regularity and
hauteur; her legs, in their black silk stockings, were straight; and the
simple white lawn frock made the best of a slender figure. Those frocks
of Honora's were a continual source of wonder and sometimes of envy--to
Aunt Mary's friends; who returned from the seaside in the autumn, after a
week among the fashions in Boston or New York, to find Honora in the
latest models, and better dressed than their own children. Aunt Mary made
no secret of the methods by which these seeming miracles were performed,
and showed Cousin Eleanor Hanbury the fashion plates in the English
periodicals. Cousin Eleanor sighed.

"Mary, you are wonderful," she would say. "Honora's