It was unkind, ungrateful, undaughterly, and every other "un" she could think of, to let such trifles destroy the comfort of the first evening at home.
Her pillow was moistened with remorseful tears, and the more she hated herself for such meanness, fickleness, and ingratitude, the more plentiful was the flow of briny drops.
Things were more tolerable in the morning. With the elasticity of youth she adjusted ideas and feelings to suit her circumstances, or, as she put it to herself, she "came to her senses." She donned the neat habit her Aunt Jean had ordered for her, and tripped down stairs when the horses were ready, radiant with pleasurable anticipation. The habit found little favor in the sight of her mother and sister. They called the gray linen braided with black "Quakerish." To her father's eyes she looked the little lady from crown to toe.
The clover-fields were aflush with bobbing blooms, and a thousand bees were swinging and humming above these; the hay was ripe for cutting; the corn-fields shook glossy lances in the face of the sun; in the woods every bird that could sing was swelling his throat and heart with music; hares scampered fearlessly in the open road under the horses' feet; and striped ground-squirrels raced on the top rails of the fences for a mile at a time, just ahead of the riders.
"I must have been tired last night," repeated Flea, filling her lungs with the scented air. "I didn't feel a bit like myself. I am all right again. How dear and beautiful everything is to-day! There's nothing like the country, after all, especially the country in Old Virginia."
With that her tongue was loosened, and she opened to her indulgent confidante her hopes, aspirations, and plans. Aunt Jean was as gentle and tender as a mother to her; her teachers were wisdom and goodness personified; she was doing well in all her classes, and had taken two prizes on Examination day, the first for composition, the second for history.
"It's like a fairy-tale," she prattled on, happily. "When I was young and foolish I used to dream of such things as are coming to pass every day, and I take them as a matter of course, until I stop to think how wonderful and nice it all is. I often call Aunt Jean my fairy godmother.'"
In return, her father talked of his hope of being his own master and a land-owner by the time her school days should be over, hopes he had shared with no one else, he said, not even her mother, who might be disappointed if they came to nothing. "My canny little lassie can always be trusted," he said, with fondness.
Happy, honored little Flea! Riding close beside him, his hand on the neck of her horse, her eyes, moist and beaming, upturned to his, she would not have exchanged places with a princess of the blood. The weakness and false pride of yesterday were recalled only to brighten by contrast the joys of to-day.
As the day neared noon the bird-music ceased, and the stir of green leaves in the weak wind did not rise above the thud of hoofs upon the dead leaves that had fallen and lain on the bridle-road for fifty winters. The crash of a falling tree, that might have been a mile away, boomed and echoed like the report of a cannon, and was a long time in dying upon the distant hills. From the virgin forest, where oaks and hickories locked arms above their heads, they emerged upon a swampy spot through which a fire had swept in April, leaving a deserted track behind it. Ferns and wild flowers were springing up as though eager to hide the blackened ruins.