It was all new and very strange to a child whose only outlook on life had been urban and banal. She had never seen a mountain, and nothing more nearly approaching a forest than the parked groves of the Bois de Boulogne. Would it be permitted that she should sometimes walk in the woods of the first Dabney, she asked, with the quaint French twisting of the phrases that she was never able fully to overcome. It would certainly be permitted; more, the Major would make her a deed to as many of the forest acres as she would care to include in her promenade. By which we see that the second part of Unc' Scipio's prophecy was finding its fulfilment in the beginning. How the French-born child fitted into the haphazard household at Deer Trace Manor, with what struggles she came through the inevitable attack of homesickness, and how Mammy Juliet and every one else petted and indulged her, are matters which need not be dwelt on. But we shall gladly believe that she was too sensible, even at the early and tender age of ten, to be easily spoiled. Many foolish things have been said and written about the wax-like quality of a child's mind; how each new impression effaces the old, and how character in permanence is not to be looked for until the bones have stopped growing. Yet who has not known criminals at twelve, and saints and angels, and wise men and women--in fine, the entire gamut of humanity--in short frocks or knee-breeches? Ardea, child of adversity and the Paris ateliers, brought one lasting memory up out of those early Deer Trace Manor years: she was always immeasurably older than such infants as Mammy Juliet and Uncle Scipio. And this also she remembered: that when these and all the others, including her grandfather and Japheth Pettigrass, were busily leveling all the barriers of restraint for her, she had built some of her own and set herself the task of living within them. I am sure she began to realize, almost at the first, that she must rise superior to the Dabney weakness, which, as exemplified by the Major, was ungoverned, and perhaps ungovernable, temper. At all events, she never forgot a summer day soon after her arrival when she first saw her grandfather transformed into a frenzied madman. He was sitting on the wide portico, smoking his long-stemmed pipe and directing Japheth Pettigrass, who was training the great crimson-rambler rose that ran well up to the eaves. Ardea, herself, was on the lawn, playing with her grandfather's latest gift, a huge, solemn-eyed Great Dane, so she did not see the man who had dismounted at the gate and walked up the driveway until he was handing his card to her grandfather. When she did see him, she looked twice at him; not because he was trigly clad in brown duck and tightly-buttoned service leggings, but because he wore his beard trimmed to a point, after the manner of the students in the Latin Quarter, and so was reminiscent of things freshly forsaken.