But you first, Carin.
As you may have guessed, we got here alive. I was really very much surprised. Between shivers and shudders I enjoyed the ride tremendously. We had two days and a half of it, sleeping at night in inns where my uncle and aunt were welcomed very warmly, and where everybody marveled over me very much as they did in the old days when Mother McBirney first took me over and carried me with her everywhere to exhibit me so lovingly and triumphantly.
Only this time there were differences; very great differences. I soon realized that to be the daughter of the house of Knox was no small matter, and though I had insisted on keeping to my homespun, and still do think it very nice, I was a trifle worried about it. But my riding suit is well cut, and it fits like a dream, and the homespun is almost as soft as camel’s hair, and the color of it, a bottle green, becomes me very well. I was wearing the little dark green Alpine hat you brought me from Switzerland, and that was becoming too.
Yet, girl-o’-my-heart, I felt frightened and insignificant enough when, having passed by way of many charming old towns and wide plantations, we came at last to the long, shady road which they told me belonged to the Knox estate. The part we passed through was all in fine old trees, not so near together but that the sun could make bright carpets in between them. Here and there, where the ground lifted, we could see the plantations, now of course in their autumn bareness, stretching in three directions.
I have always loved to read about princes and princesses who have wandered, poor and forlorn, in strange lands, and who finally return to their royal homes and live happy ever after amid a loving people. I think that is the nicest sort of a story in the world, and I often have played, when it was cold and windy in my little loft on Tennyson Mountain, and when Jim teased me, and all the family was looking at something in a different way from what I was able to do, that I was a lost princess and that by and by I would come into my own.
But I never really thought it anything but a silly, silly dream. I played with it as I used, a few years before, to play with paper dolls.
Yet here I was, Carin, being swept up to the door of my ancestral mansion. We turned a bend in the road, and then saw the house across a stretch of lawn. It was all dripping with Virginia creeper; the leaves hung red as flame from the hooded windows, and bannerets of the scarlet vine fluttered from the wide door. Did uncle tell me the house was Georgian in its style? I do not remember. At any rate, it is of old-rose brick and “I am glad, mother,” said, as mellow as a soft sunset. There are six hooded windows and the beautiful door down below, and seven windows above; then at each end of the main part of the building is an L, running obliquely out into the lawn, and here, too, are the hooded windows above, but below are galleries, and they are roofed in some places and uncovered in others, so that you can stay under cover if you like, or right out under the stars.
I found myself clasping my hands tight over my heart as I looked.
“Do you like it, dear?” asked Aunt Lorena gently.
I seized her hand.