“Hush yo’ fuss, Eddy!” she remarked authoritatively. “He don’t want nothin’.” Then, turning to me, she added civilly, “Good evenin’, suh. You must be the gentleman who is visitin’ over at Chericoke?” “Yes, I am staying with Mr. Harrison. You know him, of course?” “Oh, Lordy, yes. Everybody aroun’ here knows Mr. Harrison. His folks have been here goin’ on mighty near forever. I don’t know what me and my children would come to if it wa’n’t for him. He is gettin’ me my divorce now. It’s been three years and mo’ sence Tom deserted me.” “Divorce?” I had not expected to find this innovation on James River. “Of course it ain’t the sort of thing anybody would want to come to. But if a woman in the State ought to have one easy, I reckon it’s me. Tom went off with another woman—and she my own sister—from this very house—” “From this house—and, by the way, what is the name of it?” “Name of what? This place? Why, it’s Dare’s Gift. Didn’t you know it? Yes, suh, it happened right here in this very house, and that, too, when we hadn’t been livin’ over here mo’ than three months. After Mr. Duncan got tired and went away he left us as caretakers, Tom and me, and I asked Tilly to come and stay with us and help me look after the children. It came like a lightning stroke to me, for Tom and Tilly had known each other all their lives, and he’d never taken any particular notice of her till they moved over here and began to tend the cows together. She wa’n’t much for beauty, either. I was always the handsome one of the family—though you mightn’t think it now, to look at me—and Tom was the sort that never could abide red hair—” “And you’ve lived at Dare’s Gift ever since?” I was more interested in the house than in the tenant. “I didn’t have nowhere else to go, and the house has got to have a caretaker till it is sold. It ain’t likely that anybody will want to rent an out-of-the-way place like this—though now that automobiles have come to stay that don’t make so much difference.” “Does it still belong to the Dares?” “Naw, suh; they had to sell it at auction right after the war on account of mortgages and debts—old Colonel Dare died the very year Lee surrendered, and Miss Lucy she went off somewhere to strange parts. Sence their day it has belonged to so many different folks that you can’t keep account of it. Right now it’s owned by a Mr. Duncan, who lives out in California. I don’t know that he’ll ever come back here—he couldn’t get on with the neighbours—and he is trying to sell it. No wonder, too, a great big place like this, and he ain’t even a Virginian—” “I wonder if he would let it for a season?” It was then, while I stood there in the brooding dusk of the doorway, that the idea of the spring at Dare’s Gift first occurred to me. “If you want it, you can have it for ’most nothing, I reckon. Would you like to step inside and go over the rooms?” That evening at supper I asked Harrison about Dare’s Gift, and gleaned the salient facts of its history.