"In purchasing a place here Mr. Winthrop may not be thinking of agriculture; he may be thinking only of climate," remarked Mrs. Thorne, mildly, to her daughter.
"Climate—that is blue sky, I suppose," said Garda; "I acknowledge that there is an abundance of that here. But I advise Mr. Winthrop to buy but a small piece of ground as his standing-point, and to take his sky out perpendicularly; he can go up to any height, you know, as high as the moon, if he likes. That would be ever so much wiser than to have the same amount spread out horizontally over a quantity of swamp-land which no person in his senses could wish to own."
"But the land about here strikes me as remarkably dry," observed their visitor, amused by the girl's opposition to an idea which he had as yet so faintly outlined. He suspected, however, that she was not combating him so much as she was combating the possibility of a hope in the breast of her little mother. But poor Mrs. Thorne had been very discreet; she had not allowed herself to even look interested.
"It is as dry as the Desert of Sahara," Garda answered, with decision, "and it is as wet as a wet sponge. There is this dry white sand which you see on the pine-barrens—miles upon miles of it. Then, stretching across it here and there come the great belts of bottomless swamp. That is Florida."
"Your description is a striking one," said Winthrop, gravely. "You make me feel all the more desirous to own a little of such a remarkable combination of wet and dry."
Garda glanced at him, and this time her smile conquered her. Winthrop was conscious of a pleasure in having made her look at him and smile. For it was not a matter of course that she would do either. His feeling about her had been from the first that she was the most natural young girl he had ever met—that is, in the ranks of the educated. There was a naturalness, of course, in the Indian girls, whom he had seen in the far West, which probably exceeded Garda's; but that sort of naturalness he did not care for. Garda was natural in her own graceful way, singularly natural; her glance and her smile, while not so ready, nor so promptly hospitable as those of most girls of her age, seemed to him to possess a quality which he had come to consider almost extinct—the quality of frank, undisturbed sincerity.
"I sometimes regret that I described to my daughter so often the aspects of my northern home," said Mrs. Thorne. "It was a pleasure to me at the time (it had been a great change for me, you know), and I did not realize that they were becoming exaggerated to her, these descriptions—more beautiful than the reality. For she has dwelt too much upon them; by contrast she over-estimates them. The South, too, has its beautiful aspects: that we must allow."
Winthrop fancied that he detected a repressed plaintiveness in her tone. "She thinks her daughter cruel to keep on beating down so ruthlessly her poor little hope," was his thought. Then he answered the spoken sentence: "As she has never seen these things for herself, your descriptions must have been vivid."
"No; it is her imagination that is that."
"True—I have myself had an example of her imagination in her remarks upon agriculture."
Garda laughed. "I shall say no more about agriculture, blue sky, or anything else," she declared.
"You leave me, then, to take care of myself?"
"You do not need my assistance, I never waste it."
"I should have pretended to be quite helpless! That's the second mistake I have made this afternoon. If I had only let it be supposed that my health was delicate, Mrs. Thorne would have been much more interested in me."
"Oh no, Mr. Winthrop," said his hostess, earnestly; "you are quite mistaken. Good health is in itself full of the deepest interest, I am sure, and especially at the present day, when it is so singularly rare. I am most glad you possess it—most glad indeed."
"I possess enough of it, at any rate, to go over the place, if you will be so kind," said Winthrop. "You know you promised me that pleasure some day, and why not this afternoon? There is a delightful breeze."
Mrs. Thorne dropped her eyes to the tips of her black cloth slippers, visible beneath the skirt of her gown. These little shoes one could scarcely fail to see, since the skirt, which was neatness itself in its decent black folds, was rather scanty and short. Their age and well-worn thinness, the skilful mending of their worst places, the new home-made bindings, the fresh ribbon bows bravely tied, told a story to the observers of delicate things.
But while Mrs. Thorne surveyed her slippers, her daughter was replying: "It would hardly amuse you to go over the place, Mr. Winthrop; there is really nothing to see but the crane."
"Let us go, then, and see the crane."
"Mamma would be so delighted, you know. But she never walks."
"Not far," corrected Mrs. Thorne. "I am not strong, not able to walk far."
"And I should be delighted, too," continued Garda, "only I am so sleepy. I have fallen into the habit of spending my afternoons in the hammock; that makes me immensely drowsy just at this hour."
"I feel like an interloper," said Winthrop; "say a large mosquito."
"You needn't. It's not well to sleep so much," replied Miss Thorne, calmly.
"Certainly you know how to console. Is that the hammock in which you pass your happy existence?"
"Not existence; only afternoons. You really wish to go?" she added, seeing that he had taken his hat from the chair beside him. "We will send Raquel with you, then, as guide."
"Raquel?"
"Haven't you noticed her? She lets you in when you come. She is an important personage with us, I assure you; her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother lived on the place here before her."
Winthrop recalled the portly jet-black negress who, in answer to his knock, had opened the lower door.
"Three generations make aristocracy in America," he replied; "I am afraid of so distinguished a guide. If doomed to go without Mrs. Thorne or yourself, why may I not go alone?"
"You would never find the magnolias, you would come into the live-oak avenue at the wrong end, you would look at the ruin from its commonplace side, you would see only the back of the Cherokee roses, the crane would not dance for you, the wild cattle would run at you, and you would inevitably get into the swamp," answered the girl, checking off the items one by one on her pretty fingers.
"I have confessed my fear of Raquel, and now you display before me this terrible list of dangers. Don't you think it would be but common charity to come with me yourself? My conversation is not exciting; you could easily sleep a little, between-times, as we walk."
"I believe you have had your own way all your life," remarked Garda, "or you would never persist as you do. Your humility is nothing but a manner; in reality you expect everything to be done for you by everybody."
"Not by everybody," Winthrop responded.
Mrs. Thorne had coughed as Garda ended her speech. Mrs. Thorne often coughed, and her coughs had a character of their own; they did not appear to be pulmonary. They were delicate little sounds which came forth apologetically, shielded by her hand, never quite completed; they were not coughs so much as suggestions of coughs, and with these suggestions she was in the habit of filling little pauses in the conversation, covering up the awkwardnesses or mistakes of others (there were never any of her own to cover), or acting as hyphen for disjointed remarks when people had forgotten what they were going to say. It was, indeed, a most accomplished cough, all Gracias had been indebted to it. Lately, too, she had begun to use it to veil her own little periods of consultation with herself regarding her daughter; for she seemed by no means certain of the direction which this daughter's thoughts or words might take, and the uncertainty troubled her careful maternal mind. Garda, however, though often out of sight round some unexpected corner, was never far distant; the hurrying elderly comprehension always caught up with her before long; but these periods of uncertainty, combined with cares more material, had ended by impressing upon Mrs. Thorne's face the look of anxiety which was now its most constant expression—an anxiety