"Hm! hm!" grunted the old negress, "what Miss Frances doing comin' home dis way, dat man 'long her too?" The Faculty might be cosmopolitan; Susan was Virginian to the backbone. "An' he a fur-away-er," which was Susan's term for people from anywhere except her own State. "An' he a fur-away-er," she muttered, as she betook herself to the kitchen. Frances marched straight to the study, where the professor always lingered a short space after his dinner, and told her tale briefly. She expected many words. The professor, like many another man in an emergency, had none. His daughter was worse scared than if he had stormed. When he did speak she felt she had no idea what he would say. Would he forbid her riding altogether? She went to her dinner, but he laid down his book and looked long at the glowing coals, then got up and went his way. She was his motherless daughter, sweet, true, beloved. A girl must have some fad, he supposed. Sweethearts, or horses? He chose the latter. He never dreamed of both. V But there was a possibility of both. There was vein of sentiment through the bed-rock of Lawson's worldliness which had shown brightly once or twice, had been broken off suddenly, and which, had it been worked by skilful hands, would have yielded rich returns. When he had come east, along with the powerful reasons for his doing so had flickered now and then the glimmer of his traditions of a Virginia girl. He thought in a nebulous fashion that she should be slight, dark-eyed, dark-haired, fascinating as a woman only can be, and flirtatious as a kitten. He had met one or two of the pictured type. But from the moment when he had stepped from his own room far up the corridor one day and seen a tall, supple, well-built young woman with clear cheek and ruffled hair and serene gray eyes, holding her long white gown from the worn brick-way and walking with careless grace towards him, he had decided instantly that this was the woman of whom he had thought, and had begun to cluster his traditions about her. None would fit. If there was a grain of coquetry about Frances it slumbered; so did some other deeper feelings. He had watched, striven, for a flash of her eyes or a flush on her cheek; he had seen it, but it had been careless companionship which evoked it. And his thoughts, striving to fit her to a place she would not fill, clung about her more and more. There would be no hour for him on Sunday; it only irked him. He remembered the women he had met who were nearer the ideal of his illusions. He sought them. Frances finding at last, and most unexpectedly, a free hour, and scarce knowing what to do with it, wandered aimlessly about the house. It was so much her custom to be abroad with her father and watching the sunset over the mountain tops, that now, when he was kept by an old friend, she could not content herself. She would have her walk alone.