"Silas Grangerson thinks I care for Mr. Pinckney, he said he would be even with him. I know he intends doing him some injury. I feel it--and I want you to warn him to be careful--without telling him, of course, what I have said." Miss Pinckney was silent for a moment. She had already matched Phyl and Richard in her mind. She had come to a very full understanding of her character, and she would have given all the linen at Vernons for the certainty that those two cared for one another. Frances Rhett rode her like an obsession. Life and nature had given Maria Pinckney an acquired and instinctive knowledge of character, and in the union of Richard and Frances Rhett she divined unhappiness, just as a clever seaman divines the unseen ice-berg in the ship's track. She smelt it. "Phyl," said she, "do you care for Richard?" The question quickly put and by those lips caused no confusion in the girl's mind. "No," said she. "At least-- Oh, I don't know how to explain it--I care for everything here, for Vernons and everything in it, it is all like a story that I love--Juliet and Vernons and the past and the present. He's part of it too. I want to have it always just as it is. I didn't tell you, but when that happened in the cemetery, I was looking at her grave; you never told me it was there with his. I came on it by accident and she was seeming to speak to me out of it. I was thinking of her and him, when--that happened. It was just as though some one had struck _her_ and him. I can't explain exactly." "Strange," said Miss Pinckney. She turned and began to put away with a thoughtful air the linen she had been examining. Then she said: "I'll tell Richard and warn him to keep away from that fool, not that there is any danger--but it is just as well to warn him." Phyl helped to put away the linen and then she went upstairs to her room. She felt easier in her mind and taking her seat on a cane couch by the window she fell into a book. The History of the Civil War. This bookworm had always one sure refuge in trouble--books. Books! Have we ever properly recognised the mystery and magic that lies in that word, the magic that allows a man to lead ever so many other lives than his own, to be other people, to travel where he has never been, to laugh with folk he has never seen, to know their sorrows as he can never know the sorrows of "real people"--and their joys. Phyl had been Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre, Monte Cristo and Jo. History which is so horribly unreal because it deals with real people had never appealed to her, but the history of the Civil War was different from others. It had to do with Vernons. CHAPTER VIII After luncheon that day Phyl, having nothing better to do, went up to her room and resumed her book.