He stooped and kissed her. "It's a little girl, and it looks like you. It does truly." He stroked her forehead again, but did not speak. She roused herself and turned her head toward the dark corner of the room. "Bring it to me, mammy!" she called. The old woman walked to the cradle and made as though to lift a child from the blankets, but her arms were empty. "Bring it to me!" "Lillias!" her father was at her side where she sat erect staring at the cradle. "Lillias, darling, your mother thought it best." "Bring it to me!" The old woman drew aside the blankets and showed an empty bed. "Chile," she moaned, "dis ain't my work." There was a long silence; then the girl sank back in the sheets and turned toward the window. "You might have let me kiss it good-by," she said. Her back was to them both and again she laid her head in the crook of her arm. Her breath came softly, so very softly that what time it died away neither of the watchers knew. But when her father again touched her forehead it was quite cold, and he felt as though another baby had been sent away to be hidden out in the rain. I THE PINES CHAPTER I In the far south of the United States, where through the winter months the sun holds in warmth the blue encircling sky, opening the buds of the roses in December, where palmetto and white sand meet deep green swamp and heavily scented magnolia, there flows a great river. From its narrow source it deepens and widens until toward the end of its course it becomes an estuary, and for many miles dwellers on one side can dimly distinguish the contour of the opposite shore. The dwellers, as it happens, are not many, and the little boat that makes its daily trip to and from the busy city at the river's mouth is not overburdened with freight or passengers. It zigzags from shore to shore, stopping at one port for timber, at another to land an itinerant preacher, at a third to receive a fragrant load of oranges or grapefruit destined for a market in the north. Merryvale is one of the oldest and most important of its stops. As long as the state has had a history there has been a Merryvale living on the river bank. In the days when the alligators climbed up the long wharf to sun themselves, and the moccasins dropped from the overhanging trees into the stream, the Merryvales owned thousands of acres at the water's edge and other thousands back in the pine forests. Then there was a Merryvale in Congress and another in the State Senate, while scores of slaves tilled the land and tended the cherished orange groves. But with the passing of time the alligators slipped from the wharf, the moccasins retreated to where gunshots were less frequent, and vast stretches of pines and of river-front passed into other hands.