HOLLY [Illustration: HOLLY PLACED HER HAND IN HIS AND LEAPED LIGHTLY TO THE GROUND] [Illustration: title page] HOLLY _The Romance of a Southern Girl_ BY RALPH HENRY BARBOUR AUTHOR OF “A MAID IN ARCADY,” “KITTY OF THE ROSES,” “AN ORCHARD PRINCESS,” ETC. _With illustrations by_ EDWIN F. BAYHA [Illustration] PHILADELPHIA & LONDON J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1907 COPYRIGHT, 1907 BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1907 BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY Published October, 1907 _Electrotyped and Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company The Washington Square Press, Philadelphia, U. S. A._ TO JESSIE LATSHAW KING ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE HOLLY PLACED HER HAND IN HIS AND LEAPED LIGHTLY TO THE GROUND _Frontispiece_ PRESENTLY THE NEW RENTAL AGREEMENT WAS SIGNED 144 THE MAJOR HELD THE LITTLE BUNCH OF LEAVES AND BERRIES OVER HOLLY’S HEAD 217 “KEEP AWAY! YOU’VE KILLED HIM” 258 HOLLY I. Holly’s eighteenth birthday was but a fortnight distant when the quiet stream of her life, which since her father’s death six years before had flowed placidly, with but few events to ripple its tranquil surface, was suddenly disturbed.... To the child of twelve years death, because of its unfamiliarity and mystery, is peculiarly terrible. At that age one has become too wise to find comfort in the vague and beautiful explanations of tearfully-smiling relatives――explanations in which Heaven is pictured as a material region just out of sight beyond the zenith; too selfishly engrossed with one’s own loneliness and terror to be pacified by the contemplation of the radiant peace and beatitude attained by the departed one in that ethereal and invisible suburb. And at twelve one is as yet too lacking in wisdom to realize the beneficence of death. Thus it was that when Captain Lamar Wayne died at Waynewood, in his fiftieth year, Holly, left quite alone in a suddenly empty world save for her father’s sister, Miss India Wayne, grieved passionately and rebelliously, giving way so abjectly to her sorrow that Aunt India, fearing gravely for her health, summoned the family physician. [Illustration]