CHAPTER XIV.
THE COMING OF MISS CAROLINE She came to us auspiciously on a day in the first week of June.
Mistress Caroline Lansdale, a one-time belle of the Old Dominion, relict of the late Colonel Jere Lansdale, C.S.A., legislator and duellist, whose devotion to her in the days of their courtship had been the talk of two states.

Not less notable than his eloquence in the forum, his skill in the duello, had been the determined fervor with which he knelt at her feet.

And I waited no more than a hundred seconds in her presence to applaud his discernment.
I had pictured an old woman--some aged trifle of an elder day, sad, withered, devitalized, intemperately reminiscent--steeped in traditions that would leave her formidable, and impracticable as a friend to me.

I had fancied her thus, from Clem's fragmentary and chance descriptions and my own knowledge of what she should be by all laws of the probable; and she was not as I had evolved her.
The day she came was one of Little Arcady's best; quite all that her anxious servitor could have wished,--a day of summer's first abundance, when our green-bordered streets basked in a tempered sunlight, and our trim white cottages nestled coolly back of their flower gardens.

Harried alien as she was, she would be welcomed with smiles, and I was glad for her sake and Clem's when I hurried home to dress for that first dinner with her.
On my way across the lawn at six-thirty I picked a bunch of the newly opened yellow roses as a peace offering, should one be needed.