em, sir!"

A voice just beyond the green-veiled fence cast a light on this reply
and brought a flush to the Creole's very brows. "Alas! Greenleaf," it
cried, "we search in vain! He is not here! We are even more alone than
we seem! Ah! where is that peerless chevalier, my beloved, accomplished,
blameless, sagacious, just, valiant and amiable uncle? Come let us press
on. Let not the fair sex find him first and snatch him from us forever!"

The General's scorn showed only in his eyes as they met the blaze of
Mandeville's. "You were about to remark--?" he began, but rose and
started toward the carriage.

There not many minutes later you might have seen the four men amicably
gathered and vying in clever speeches to pretty Mrs. Callender and her
yet fairer though less scintillant step-daughter Anna.

III

THE GENERAL'S CHOICE

Anna Callender. In the midst of the gay skirmish and while she yielded
Greenleaf her chief attention, Hilary observed her anew.

What he thought he saw was a golden-brown profusion of hair with a
peculiar richness in its platted coils, an unconsciously faultless poise
of head, and, equally unconscious, a dreamy softness of sweeping lashes.
As she laughed with the General her student noted further what seemed to
him a rare silkiness in the tresses, a vapory lightness in the short
strands that played over the outlines of temple and forehead, and the
unstudied daintiness with which they gathered into the merest mist of a
short curl before her exquisite ear.

[Illustration: Anna]

But when now she spoke with him these charms became forgettable as he
discovered, or fancied he did, in her self-oblivious eyes, a depth of
thought and feeling not in the orbs alone but also in the brows and
lids, and between upper and under lashes as he glimpsed them in profile
while she turned to Mandeville. And now, unless his own insight misled
him, he observed how unlike those eyes, and yet how subtly mated with
them, was her mouth; the delicate rising curve of the upper lip, and the
floral tenderness with which it so faintly overhung the nether,
wherefrom it seemed ever about to part yet parted only when she spoke or
smiled.

"A child's mouth and a woman's eyes," he mused.

When her smiles came the mouth remained as young as before,
yet suddenly, as truly as the eyes, showed--showed him at
least--steadfastness of purpose, while the eyes, where fully
half the smile was, still unwittingly revealed their d