These two, brought up on adjoining plantations, had known each other from their earliest childhood, but in later years they had seen little of each other. Boyd had been away, first at boarding-school and afterwards at the University, while the motherless girl had been slowly and awkwardly growing to womanhood, under care of her aunt and the tutelage of an accomplished governess. It was only during vacations that the two had met, and during the last two summers they had not met at all, for the reason that Margaret, with her father, had been travelling in the North and Canada and in what was then the great West during both those seasons. It was with surprise, therefore, not unmixed with the awe of strangeness, that on his return from the University this year he had found his little playmate grown into a beautiful and very dignified womanhood. She presided now at The Oaks, her father's plantation, with all the gracious ease that enabled Virginia women of that time to make of plantation houses delightful centres of unruffled hospitality, where the coming and going of guests was in no way a matter of previous arrangement and where neither the coming nor the going created the smallest ripple in the placid self-composure of the well-ordered life of the mansion. So great was the change in her, or so great did it seem to Boyd, that at first he hesitated and faltered over the old familiar form of address. It did not seem possible to him to call this dignified and almost stately young woman "Margaret" as he had always called the little girl that she had been. He could not address her as "Miss Conway" but he thought he might compromise on the form "Miss Margaret." The first time he addressed her in that fashion was the only time. She looked at him in dignified surprise for a moment; then with a rippling little laugh that seemed to him singularly charming, she said: "If we have become such strangers, Boyd, that you must put a handle to my name, I'll give you all your honors and address you as 'Boyd Westover, Esq., M. A., University of Virginia.' You are to call me just 'Margaret,' please, as you've always done, if you wish to be just 'Boyd' to me."