They started at ten o’clock next morning for Charleston, the Colonel standing on the house steps and waving his hand to them as they drove off. Silas was nowhere to be seen, he had gone out before breakfast, so the butler said, and had not returned. Miss Pinckney resented this casual treatment.

“He ought to have been here to bid us good-bye,” said she, as they cleared the avenue. “He’s got the name for being a mad creature, but even mad creatures may show common courtesy. I’m sure I don’t know where he gets his manners from unless it’s his mother’s lot, same place as he got his good looks.”

“Why do you say he’s mad?” asked Phyl.

“Because he is. Not exactly mad, maybe, but eccentric, he swum Charleston harbour with his clothes on because some one dared him, and was nearly drowned with the tide coming in or going out, I forget which; and another day he got on the engine at Charleston station and started the train, drove it too, till they managed to climb over the top of the carriages or something and stop him—at least that’s the story. He’ll come to a bad end, that boy, unless he mends his ways. Lots of people say he’s got good in him. So he has, perhaps, but it’s just that sort that come to the worst end, unless the good manages to fight the bad and get it under in time.”

Phyl said nothing. Her mind was disturbed. She had slept scarcely at all during the night, and her feelings towards Silas Grangerson, now that she was beyond his reach, were alternating in the strangest way between attraction and repulsion.

They would have repelled the thought of him entirely but for the instinctive recognition of the fact that his conduct had been the result of impulse, the impulse of a child, ill governed, and accustomed to seize what it wanted. Added to that was the fact of his entire naturalness. From the moment of their first meeting he had talked to her as though they were old acquaintances. Unless when talking to his father, everything in his manner, tone, conversation was free, unfettered by convention, fresh, if at times startling. This was his great charm, and at the same time his great defect, for it revealed his want of qualities no less than his qualities.

Do what she could she was unable to escape from the incident of last night, it was as though those strong arms had not quite released their hold upon her, as though Pan had broken from the bushes, shown her by his magic things she had never dreamed of, and vanished.

It was nearly two o’clock when they reached Vernons. Richard Pinckney was at home, and at the sight of him Phyl’s heart went out towards him. Clean, well groomed, honest, kindly, he was like a breath of fresh sea air after breathing tropical swamp atmosphere.

Strange to say Miss Pinckney seemed to feel somewhat the same.

“Yes, we’re back,” said she, as they passed into the dining-room where some refreshments were awaiting them, “and glad I am to be back. Vernons smells good after Grangersons. Oh, dear me, what is it that clings to that place? It’s like opening an old trunk that’s been shut for years. I told Seth Grangerson, right out flat, he ought to get away from there into the world somewhere, but there he sits clinging to his rheumatism and the past. I declare I nearly cried last night as he was showing me all those old pictures.”

“He’s not very ill then,” said Richard.

“Ill! Not he. It was that fool Silas sent the telegram. Just an attack of rheumatism.”

She went upstairs to change and the two young people went into the garden, where Richard Pinckney was having some alterations done.

On the day Phyl’s hair went up it seemed to Richard that a new person had come to live with them. Phyl had suddenly turned into a young woman—and such a young woman! He had never considered her looks before, to young men of his age and temperament girls in pigtails are, as far as the manhood in them is concerned, little more and sometimes less than things. But Phyl with her hair up was not to be denied, and had he not been philandering after Frances Rhett, and had Phyl been a total stranger suddenly seen, it is quite possible that a far warmer feeling than admiration might have been the result. As it was she formed a new interest in life.

He showed her the alterations he was making, slight enough and causing little change in the general plan of the garden.

“I scarcely like doing anything,” said he, “but that new walk will be no end of an improvement, and it will save that bit of grass which is being trodden to death by people crossing it, then there’s all those bushes by the gate, they’re going, those behind the tree,—a little space there will make all the difference in the world.”

“Behind the magnolia?”

“Yes.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Phyl.

“Why?”

“Because they have been there always and—well, look!”

She led the way behind the tree, pushed the bushes aside and disclosed the seat.

She no longer felt that she was betraying a secret. Her experience at Grangersons had in some way made Vernons seem to her now really her home, and Richard Pinckney closer to her in relationship.

“Why, how did you know that was there?” said Richard. “I’ve never seen it.”

“Juliet Mascarene used to sit there with—with some one she was in love with. I found some of her old letters and they told about it—see, it’s a little arbour, used to be, though it’s all so overgrown now.”

“Juliet,” said he. “That was the girl who died. I have heard Aunt Maria talk about her and she keeps her room just as it used to be. Who was the somebody?”

“It was a Mr. Rupert Pinckney.”

“I knew there was a love story of some sort connected with her, but I never worried about the details. So they used to come and sit here.”

“Yes, he’d come to the gate at night and she’d meet him. Her people did not want her to marry him and so they had to meet in secret.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Before you were born,” said Phyl.

He looked at her.

“Aunt is always saying how like you are to her,” said he, “but she’s mad on family likenesses, and I never thought of it. It may be a want in me but I’ve never taken much interest in dead relatives; but somehow, finding this little place tucked away here gives one a jog. It’s like finding a nest in a tree. How long have you known of it?”

“Oh, some time. I found a bundle of her old letters—” she paused. Richard Pinckney had taken his place on the little seat, just as one sits down in an armchair to see if it is comfortable, and was leaning back amidst the bush branches.

“This is all right,” said he, “sit down, there’s lots of room—you found her letter, tell us all about it.”

Phyl sat down and told the little story. It seemed to interest him.

“The Pinckneys lost money,” said he, “and that’s why the old Mascarene birds were set against her marrying him, I suppose. Makes one wild that sort of thing. What right have people to interfere?”

“Money seems everything in this world,” said Phyl.

“It’s not—it seems to be, but it’s not. Money can’t buy happiness after one is grown up. You remember I told you that over in Ireland; when candy and fishing rods mean happiness money is all right—after that money is useful enough, but it’s the making of it and not the spending it that counts,—that and a lot of things that have nothing to do with money. If the Mascarenes hadn’t been fools they’d have seen that a poor man with kick in him—and the Pinckneys always had that—was as good as a rich man, and those two might have got married.”

“No,” said Phyl, “they never could have got married, he had to die. He was killed, you know, at the beginning of the war.”

“You’re a fatalist.”

“Well, things happen.”

“Yes, but you can stop them happening very often.”

“How?”

“Just by willing it.”

“Yes,” said Phyl meditatively, “but how are you to use your will against what comes unexpectedly. Now that telegram yesterday morning took me to Grangersons with Miss Pinckney. Suppose—suppose I had broken my leg or, say, fallen into a well there and got drowned—that would have been Fate.”

“No,” said Pinckney, “carelessness, the telegram would not have drowned you, but your carelessness in going too close to the well.”

“Suppose,” said Phyl, “instead of that, Mr. Silas Grangerson had shot me by accident with a gun—the telegram would have brought me to that without any carelessness of mine.”

“No, it couldn’t,” said Pinckney lightly, “it would still have been your own fault for going near such a hare-brained scamp. Oh, I’m only joking, what I really mean is that nine times out of ten the thing people call Fate is nothing more than want of foresight.”

“And the tenth time it is Fate,” said Phyl rising.