"I do think so," she answered with a low laugh as she arose to her feet,
drew Caroline up into the bend of her arm and faced Mrs. Buchanan and the
major. "I know the loveliness in the statue is what the great man got out
of the loveliness in your heart, and the major and Mrs. Matilda think so,
too. And I'm going quick because I must; and I'm coming back as soon as I
can because I'm going to find you here--that is _partly_, Major," and
before they could stop her she had gone on down the hall and they heard
her answer Jeff's farewell as he let her out the door.
"That, Caroline Darrah Brown, was your first and most important
conquest," observed the major. "Phoebe has a white rock heart but a
crystal cracked therefrom is apt to turn into a jewel of price. Hers
is a blood-ruby friendship that pays for the wearing and cherishing. But
it's time for the nap Mrs. Matilda decides for me to take and I must
leave you ladies to your dimity talk." With which he betook himself to
his room, still plainly pleased at the result of Phoebe's call on the
stranger.
The two women thus left to their own devices spent a delightful half-hour
wandering over the house and discussing its furnishings and arrangements.
Mrs. Buchanan never tired of the delights of her town home. The house was
very stately and old-world, with its treasures of rare ancestral rosewood
and mahogany that she had brought in from the Seven Oaks Plantation. The
rooms in the country home had been so crowded with treasures of bygone
generations that they were scarcely dismantled by the furnishing of
the town house.
She was in her glory of domesticity, and as she passed from one room to
another she told Caroline bits of interesting history about this piece or
that. In her naiveté she let the girl see into the long hard years that
had been a hand-to-hand struggle for her and the major on their worn
farm lands out in the beautiful Harpeth Valley.
The cropping out of phosphate on the bare fields had brought a
comfortable fortune in its train to the old soldier farmer and they had
moved into this town house to spend the winter in greater accessibility
to their friends. Her own particular little world had welcomed her with
delight, and Caroline could see that she was taking a second bellehood as
if it had been an uninterrupted reign.
Most of the financiers of the city were the major's old friends and they
managed enormously advantageous contracts with mining companies for him,
and had taken him into the schemes of the mighty with the most manifest
cordiality.
His study became the scene of much important plot and counter-plot. They
found in his mind the quality which had led them to outwit many an enemy
when he scouted ahead of their tattered regiment, still available when
the enemy appeared under commercial or civic front. Also it naturally
happened that his library gradually became the hunting-grounds for Mrs.
Matilda's young people, who were irresistibly drawn into the circle of
his ever ready sympathy.