The spare room, or "parlor-chamber," was delightfully cool and pure looking, decked out in white dimity, stiff with starch, and full of an air of grandeur.
The cook-room of the house was at the rear of the mansion, apart from it, and the different dishes were carried through a covered passage. Afar down the grounds were the stables, back of them the quarters of the black servants, and still beyond, the wide plantation or tobacco fields.
At one side of the garden, midst lawn and shrubbery, was a stone wall bounding one part of the grounds, and close to this wall was a little summer-house, or arbor, where the young people liked to stray of an evening, and enjoy the cool, sweet breezes of the fair Southland.
Just outside this high, bordering wall, was a thick hedge nearly as high as the wall itself, and with but the merest space between. And here it was, between wall and hedge, that Sally, poor, half-neglected little Maid Sally, was wild to cut over from Slipside Row and hide herself.
Because, ah! because she had found out that young Lionel Grandison, son of Sir Percival and Lady Gabrielle Grandison, was in the habit of roving over to the arbor after supper with his books, and supposing himself alone, would often read aloud.
But now, his cousin, the Lady Rosamond Earlscourt, was spending the summer at Ingleside, and Lionel, sixteen, tall, straight, and manly in his boyish beauty, was reading aloud evenings to his fair cousin Rosamond and his sister, Lucretia Grandison, a Fairy story.
He had read later than usual the night before, and, ah! it was almost as if a Fairy had lifted her lightsome wand and granted some great boon when Mistress Cory Ann said to Sally that after supper she could go where she liked, and work would be over for the day.
That would give her time in which to do a bit of prinking, even such as pulling out her tangled locks and putting her poor little dress as straight as she could, then to run over to Ingleside at about the time that supper would be over there, and Lionel would begin his delightful reading.
No wonder Sally squeezed her own spare little sides with delight, as she realized that now unless it rained she could fly night after night to her enchanted grounds, and hear the clear voice of young Lionel Grandison reading the beautiful Fairy tale.
Yes, it was of a truth like a piece of Fairy luck that had come into the child's lonely life.