"Ma-Lila, don't make me tell stories; she doesn't believe them, and I am so tired saying things I don't mean. I want to go back to the side table, where you are not always scolding me. Grandma, it will be peacefuller if I stay with Ma-Lila——"
"Hush! Come here."
Mrs. Maurice lifted the little one's dimpled chin and studied the fair face that had bloomed seven years in her lonely home: a winsome face cut like a gem, velvety-brown eyes, long-lashed, and the pure, pale oval set in a shining bronze frame of curling hair, all chestnut in shade, braided with gold when sunshine hid among the ripples.
"Kent! Kent—even her ears small as any other rogue's. She is her father's child."
"Is that a sin, grandma?"
Mrs. Maurice swiftly laid her hand over the uplifted, upbraiding eyes, to veil something in their depths that often disquieted her, and sought refuge in her habitual command:
"Take her away, Eliza."
Ringing the small bell close to the breakfast tray, the mistress took a spray of starry jasmine from the vase in the centre of the table, and as she turned away said to the grey-haired butler:
"Aaron, you will put a plate and chair for Miss Eglah at the side table until further orders. Tell Oliver I shall not want the carriage until four o'clock."
Unusually tall and very handsome was this stately widow of a Confederate general who had been slain during one of the fierce conflicts around beleaguered Richmond. No white hairs marred the glossy blackness of the thick coil half hidden under a snowy crêpe cap, and the brilliant blue eyes were undimmed by tearful years of widowhood—a widowhood involving for her the full, sad significance of the sacred and melancholy term, an inability to forget, a despair of any earthly consolation, and a jealous reticence that denied all discussion of her sorrow, as she would have defended her dead from an alien's rude touch. To her, time had brought neither oblivion nor alleviation, only a sharpened sense of irreparable bereavement; and as one standing in an unending and hopeless eclipse, she accepted the gloom with a stern and silent rejection of all other lights when the sun of her life went down.