had all the evening been tinkling in his ears. Not that Miss Noble had troubled him in the least with any thing like love at first sight. She was not a girl for him to fall in love with; but her gentle, earnest voice, her grace of person and manner, and her half-girlish, half-womanly independence of speech had touched him and quickened in him germs of sympathy he had thought long since dead. He felt old dry wells of feeling bubbling afresh. He was gently moved as if by a subtle change within him. Mrs. Noble found him with this mood upon him, and it lent to his talk its freshness and fascination. She was charmed, and when she was told that for the past six years he had scarcely left the cabin over in the mountains, the touch of mystery did not lessen her interest in him.
Moreton, without thought of what sympathy he might arouse by his peculiarly graphic manner of presenting the subject, described to Miss Cordelia the wild, strange prettiness of Milly White and the pathetic ignorance in which her whole nature seemed steeped.
"Why, how romantic!" she exclaimed, "she must be interesting. She ought to be taught. There may be something well worth developing behind those wonderful, mysterious eyes of that girl."
Cordelia's school days were not yet so far in the past that she had got rid of certain academical theories. She still reveled in the belief that education might make a king of a frog.
"If she could be taught," said Moreton, in a reflective way; "but I suppose such a thing is impossible. She comes of such vulgar ancestry, ignorance and stupidity are her heritage, don't you know, and she probably has no capacity. Her limitations are set and nothing can broaden them, I fear. But her beauty, if it may be called by that name, is certainly remarkable. I have never seen a more perfect form—petite, lithe as a leopard's and as graceful as a fawn's, and her face has something in it so appealingly and so hopelessly sweet and pure. But then such vacancy, such hideous ignorance."
Cordelia grew interested. Her vivid imagination took quick and strong hold on his sketch of this mountain girl, filling in with its own lines and coloring the spaces he had left.
"Why hasn't Mr. Reynolds taught her?" she exclaimed, with just a trace of deprecation in her voice. "He has been over there so long, living in the same house. It's a shame that he has not directed her mind so as to awaken some——" she stopped short and a little color flushed her cheeks.
"Oh, Reynolds sees nothing of her fine points," Moreton hastened to say without choice of words. "He's a Southerner, don't you know, and considers her poor white trash—that's the phrase here. He thinks it absurd that a gentleman should look at such a girl long enough to form any opinion as to the question of her beauty."
The conversation was broken in upon and ended at this point by some trivial turn of the evening's happenings, and soon after Reynolds and Moreton took their leave.
They walked toward the hotel, each silently revolving in his mind that part of his experience at the banker's house which had chanced to most deeply impress him. Reynolds, in fact, was scarcely conscious of his companion's presence, so full was he of many other indeterminate but wholly pleasing plans for making Miss Noble happy with his dogs and gun when they should meet at General DeKay's plantation. Moreton had lighted a cigarette and pulled his hat down over his eyes.