“Of course,” the Colonel went on, with a conciliatory touch in his words, when he had waited some time for his daughter to speak and she spoke not--“of course you do not care a straw for him, Phyllis; I know that. The daughter of a Sommerton couldn't care for such a--” “I don't mind saying to you that I do care for him, and that I love him, and want to marry him,” broke in Phyllis, with tremulous vehemence, tears gushing from her eyes at the same time; and a depth of touching pathos seemed to open behind her words, albeit they rang like so many notes of rank boldness in the old man's ears. “Phyllis!” he exclaimed; then he stooped a little, his trousers bagging still more, and he stood in an attitude almost stagy, a flare of choleric surprise leaping into his face. “Phyllis Sommerton what _do_ you mean? Are you crazy? You say that to me?” The girl--she was just eighteen--faced her father with a look at once tearfully saucy and lovingly firm. The sauciness, however, was superficial and physical, not in any degree a part of her mental mood. She could not, had she tried, have been the least bit wilful or impertinent with her father, who had always been a model of tenderness. Besides, a girl never lived who loved a parent more unreservedly than Phyllis loved Colonel Sommerton. “Go to your room, miss! go to your room! Step lively at that, and let me have no more of this nonsense. Go! I command you!” The stamp with which the Colonel's rather substantial boot just then shook the floor seemed to generate some current of force sufficient to whirl Phyllis about and send her up-stairs in an old-fashioned fit of hysteria. She was crying and talking and running all at the same time, her voice made liquid like a bird's, and yet jangling with its mixed emotions. Down fell her wavy, long, brown hair almost to her feet, one rich strand trailing over the rail as she mounted the steps, while the rustling of her muslin dress told off the springy motion of her limbs till she disappeared in the gilt-papered gloom aloft, where the windowless hall turned at right angles with the stairway. Colonel Sommerton was smiling grimly by this time, and his iron-gray mustache quivered humorously. “She's a little brick,” he muttered; “a chip off the old log--by zounds, she is! She means business. Got the bit in her teeth, and fairly splitting the air!” He chuckled raucously. “Let her go; she'll soon tire out.” Sommerton Place, a picturesque old mansion, as mansions have always gone in north Georgia, stood in a grove of oaks on a hill-top overlooking a little mountain town, beyond which uprose a crescent of blue peaks against a dreamy summer sky. Behind the house a broad plantation rolled its billow-like ridges of corn and cotton. The Colonel went out on the veranda and lit a cigar, after breaking two or three matches that he nervously scratched on a column. This was the first quarrel that he had ever had with Phyllis.