Phyl's mother had been a Mascarene, a member of the old, adventurous family that settled in Virginia when Virginia was a wilderness and spread its branches through the Carolinas when the Planter was king of the South. Red hair had run among the Mascarenes, red hair and a wild spirit that brooked no contradiction and knew no fear. Phyl had inherited something of this restless and daring spirit. She had run away from the Rottingdean Academy for the Daughters of the Nobility and Gentry where she had been sent at the age of twelve; making her way back to Ireland like a homing pigeon, she had turned up one morning at breakfast time, quite unshaken by her experiences of travel and with the announcement that she did not like school. Had her mother been alive the traveller would have been promptly returned, but Phyl's father, good, easy man, was too much taken up with agrarian disputes, hunting, and the affairs of country life to bother much about the small affair of his daughter's future and education. He accepted her rejection of his plans, wrote a letter of apology to the Rottingdean Academy, and hired a governess for her. She wore out three in eighteen months, declared herself dissatisfied with governesses and competent to finish the process of educating and polishing herself. This she did with the aid of all the books in the library, old Dunn, the rat-catcher of Arranakilty, a man profoundly versed in the habits of rodents and birds, Larry the groom, and sundry others of low estate but high intelligence in matters of sport and woodcraft. Now it might be imagined from the foregoing that hardihood, self-assertion, and other unpleasant characteristics would be indicated in the manner and personality of this lover of freedom and rebel against restraint. Not at all. She was a most lovable and clinging person, when she could get hold of anything worth clinging to, with a mellifluous Irish voice at once soothing and distracting, a voice with pockets in it but not a trace of a brogue or only the very faintest suspicion. Yet when she spoke she had the Irish turn of words and she used the word "sure" in a manner strange to the English. She had reached the point in the "Gold Bug" where Jupp is threatening to beat Legrand, when, laying the book down beside her on the hearthrug, she sat with her hands clasping her knees and her eyes fixed on the fire. The tale had suddenly lost interest. She was thinking of her dead father, the big, hearty man who had gone to America only eight weeks ago and who would never return. He had gone on a visit to some of his wife's people, fallen ill, and died.