Her ownership of the house, and her manner of taking it, gave her an immediate social standing far above that of her mother. She knew that she was envied: the bright-haired, beautiful young woman who held the ramparts of the big house and challenged all comers to conquer her.
There were men who tried, and the first nearly succeeded. Even now, after many years, she could remember Poll's youthful, arrogant face, his lazy smile. They had met in the market place.
"An attractive spitfire, if ever I saw one," he had said to her. "Would you surrender to my arms, pretty one?"
"If you're strong enough to come and take me," she challenged, fire singing in her blood.
And that night he had come. In the starlight she fired from her windows at the shadowy figure that flitted among the bushes and trees, and powder smoke hung heavy in the air. It was after several hours and a long silence, when she thought he had given up and gone away, that he almost surprised her.
She was crouching in the parlour, waiting for the dawn, when there was a slight noise behind her. She whirled, whipping up her gun, and he was coming toward her swiftly and silently from the hall, a smile of triumph on his handsome face.
He was holding out his arms for her and there was no weapon in his hand when she shot him down.
She wept for a long time over his fair body, and knew to her shame that she had wanted him to conquer. Then she took him out and buried him beneath the grass. His grave was the first one, and behind it later she erected the wooden plaque bearing the words of the Constitution of Pamplin.
Others had tried, and their graves were here, with Poll's. And the years had passed, and no man had overrun the defenses of Lauria's house.
The frost of autumn was in her veins now as she looked at the graves of twelve young men, who had been young and eager in the years when she had been young. Slowly she turned away, went out the barred front gate of her property and waited for the crowd of merrymakers she would accompany to the party in town.