If Aunt India never learned the cause she was at least quick to note the result. Holly’s thin little cheeks borrowed tints from the Duchess roses in the garden, and Aunt India graciously gave the credit to Kentucky air, even as she drew her white silk shawl more closely about her slender shoulders and shivered in the unaccustomed chill of a Kentucky autumn.
Then followed six tranquil years in which Holly grew from a small, long-legged, angular child to a very charming maiden of eighteen, dainty with the fragrant daintiness of a southern rosebud; small of stature, as her mother had been before her, yet possessed of a gracious dignity that added mythical inches to her height; no longer angular but gracefully symmetrical with the soft curves of womanhood; with a fair skin like the inner petal of a La France rose; with eyes warmly, deeply brown, darkened by large irises; a low, broad forehead under a wealth of hair just failing of being black; a small, mobile mouth, with lips as freshly red as the blossoms of the pomegranate tree in the corner of the yard, and little firm hands and little arched feet as true to beauty as the needle to the pole. God sometimes fashions a perfect body, and when He does can any praise be too extravagant?
For the rest, Holly Wayne at eighteen—or, to be exact, a fortnight before—was perhaps as contradictory as most girls of her age. Warm-hearted and tender, she could be tyrannical if she chose; dignified at times, there were moments when she became a breath-taking madcap of a girl,—moments of which Aunt India strongly but patiently disapproved; affectionate and generous, she was capable of showing a very pretty temper which, like mingled flash of lightning and roar of thunder, was severe but brief; tractable, she was not pliant, and from her father she had inherited settled convictions on certain subjects, such for instance as Secession and Emancipation, and an accompanying dash of contumacy for the protection of them.
She was fond of books, and had read every sombre-covered volume of the British Poets from fly-leaf to fly-leaf. She preferred poetry to prose, but when the first was wanting she put up cheerfully with the latter. The contents of her father’s modest library had been devoured with a fine catholicity before she was sixteen. Recent books were few at Corunna, and had Holly been asked to name her favorite volume of fiction she would have been forced to divide the honor between certain volumes of The Spectator, St. Elmo, and The Wide, Wide World. She was intensely fond of being out of doors; even in her crawling days her negro mammy had found it a difficult task to keep her within walls; and so her reading had ever been al fresco. Her favorite place was under the gnarled old fig-tree at the end of the porch, where, perched in a comfortable crotch of trunk and branch, or asway in a hammock, she spent many of her waking hours. When the weather kept her indoors, she never thought of books at all. Those stood with her for filtered sunlight, green-leaf shadows, and the perfume-laden breezes.
Her education, begun lovingly and sternly by her father, had ended with a four-years’ course at a neighboring Academy, supplying her with as much knowledge as Captain Wayne would have considered proper for her. He had held to old-fashioned ideas in such matters, and had considered the ability to quote aptly from Pope or Dryden of more appropriate value to a young woman than a knowledge of Herbert Spencer’s absurdities or a bowing acquaintance with Differential Calculus. So Holly graduated very proudly from the Academy, looking her sweetest in white muslin and lavender ribbons, and was quite, quite satisfied with her erudition and contentedly ignorant of many of the things that fit into that puzzle which we are pleased to call Life.
And now, in the first week of November in the year 1898, the tranquil stream of her existence was about to be disturbed. Although she could have no knowledge of it, as yet, Fate was already poising the stone which, once dropped into that stream, was destined to cause disquieting ripples, perplexing eddies, distracting swirls and, in the end, the formation of a new channel. And even now the messenger of Fate was limping along with the aid of his stout cane, coming nearer and nearer down the road from the village under the shade of the water-oaks, a limp and a tap for every beat of Holly’s unsuspecting heart.
II.
Holly sat on the back porch, her slippered feet on the topmost step of the flight leading to the “bridge” and from thence to the yard. She wore a simple white dress and dangled a blue-and-white-checked sun-bonnet from the fingers of her right hand. Her left hand was very pleasantly occupied, since its pink palm cradled Holly’s chin. Above the chin Holly’s lips were softly parted, disclosing the tips of three tiny white teeth; above the mouth, Holly’s eyes gazed abstractedly away over the roofs of the buildings in the yard and the cabins behind them, over the tops of the Le Conte pear-trees in the back lot, over the fringe of pines beyond, to where, like a black speck, a buzzard circled and dropped and circled again above a distant hill. I doubt if Holly saw the buzzard. I doubt if she saw anything that you or I could have seen from where she sat. I really don’t know what she did see, for Holly was day-dreaming, an occupation to which she had become somewhat addicted during the last few months.
The mid-morning sunlight shone warmly on the back of the house. Across the bridge, in the kitchen, Aunt Venus was moving slowly about in the preparation of dinner, singing a revival hymn in a clear, sweet falsetto: