A moment they all were still. Then the little breast of Alexina began to heave. The Leroys had never seen her this way. Sally Ann had, many times, and Nelly once or twice. She threw herself upon Charlotte. "I want to go, too; I want to go; I hate it--there," with a motion of self toward the big, white house visible through the window. "I hate it, and I want to go too." They were all crying now. Suddenly King William stood forth in front of the child. "When we get rich, I'll come for you," he said. The practical Alexina looked through the arrested tears as she sat up. "But if you don't get rich?" she questioned. Charlotte laughed. She was half child herself. The laugh died. The other half was woman. "Then he won't come; if he is the son of his father, he won't come." PART TWO "Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbour's creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone." EMERSON. CHAPTER ONE Alexina Blair, at twenty, returned from school to her uncle's home with but small emotion, as, at fourteen, she had left with little regret, yet the shady streets, the open front doors, the welcomes called from up-stairs windows as she passed--evidences that she was back among her own people in the South--all at once made her glad to be here. How could she have felt emotion over a mere return to Uncle Austen's house? She might have felt enthusiasm over Nelly, but Nelly was married to the gardener at her old asylum and a Katy had taken her place. The house was the same. If only its stone façade might be allowed to mellow, to grey a little! But, newly cleaned, it stood coldly immaculate in its yard of shaven lawn set about with clipped shrubberies. As for her uncle, Alexina found herself applying the same adjectives to him, shaven, immaculate, cold. She wondered what he thought of her, but Uncle Austen never made personal remarks. Aunt Harriet, on joining her niece in the East early in the summer, had looked at her consideringly. She seemed pleased. "Why," she said, "Alexina, you are a Tennyson young person, tall and most divinely--you are a little more intense in your colouring than is usual with a Blair. I'm glad." The somewhat doubtful smile on the girl's face deepened as if a sudden radiance leaped into it. She seized her aunt's hand. "Oh," she said, "you're very nice, Aunt Harriet." Harriet laughed, rather pleased than not, but she still was studying the girl. "She is impulsive and she doesn't look set," the aunt was telling herself--was it gratefully? "perhaps she is less Blair than I thought." Austen Blair too, in fact, now viewed his niece with complacency--she fulfilled the Blair requirements--but he talked of other things. "It is the intention of your aunt and myself," he told her promptly, "to introduce you at once to what will be your social world, for it is well for everyone to have local attachment."