In good truth Anastasie—such was her mother’s Louisiana name in baptism, and her own—was not unmindful of the ways of woman in older lands, in spite of the surroundings into which fate had cast her. And truly she was beautiful—rarely, astonishingly, confusingly beautiful. The man did not live who could have seen her now and not have felt his heart leap to joy in the universe and its ways. She led them back into the house. Her very presence filled the low-ceiled room, one of the two at the right of the four corners made by the right-angled double halls. The adobe ranch house of Del Sol was built like others of the Saxon Southwest, so that each breath of air might be caught from any direction of the wind; an arrangement cooler than a patio for a house surrounded on two sides by a grove of giant live oaks draped heavily in Spanish moss. The interior gave a rude setting for a picture such as this young woman made. The ease and luxury of lower Louisiana, for a wealthy generation of sugar-cane planters the repository of Europe’s best art and last luxuries, were not reflected in the first Saxon generation of the Texas border. True, the furniture in part was traceable to earlier days. Two paintings, three framed samplers, told of a mother’s hands. There was a heavy claw-foot table. A few mismated chairs of the Empire stood in a row. But a rawhide settee and four splat-bottom chairs frankly admitted the limit of such supplies; the prevailing flavor of the borderland could not be denied. Not so much of a marvel, for at that time there was not a hundred miles of railroad within the boundaries of Texas, and everything from the East must survive the toil and danger of wagon freighting. In one corner of the room was a conical upright Mexican fireplace. Opposed to this and covered with soft tanned baby-calfskins of varied colors, stood the one thing which had saved the soul of Anastasie Lockhart the first, as of Anastasie the second—the piano, regarded with awe by all the cattle hands. On the piano stood, now, a vase of flowers. They were very fresh flowers. Jim Nabours knew they had not been there an hour earlier, for he had called before breakfast and they were not there then; though he knew Taisie’s garden had some blossoms. What shall escape the eye of a maiden? Tapered conchas on a bridle strap, neat boots, a well-shaped hat, a way of sitting in a saddle, the air of a family that had once come down from Tennessee on the Natchez Trace and the Old River Road, to Louisiana, to Texas? Nay, not so easily are a maid’s eyes baffled, though she shall have had but a single look at a newcome young man opening her gate a hundred yards away. Hence these flowers, hence this frock, the reason for which Jim Nabours could not analyze.