And so when toward the end of her journey the train slid into a pleasant country, mellow with the evening sun, long reaches of rolling pasture and hill and fertile bottom-land that meant Kentucky, something welled up in the girl's heart deeper than glamour of place, stronger than regret for her sheltered little past, than fear and hope for her unguessed future; perhaps the deepest and strongest feeling life plants in the human soul--the blood-tie. Weak or brave, fraud or fool or honorable gentleman--perhaps a little of all these things--it was her father who waited there for a woman to come and make him a home again; and Joan was ready. CHAPTER IV The fellow-traveler who had incurred Miss Darcy's displeasure by a too-active sympathy was much pleased, being of a sentimental turn of mind, to witness a family reunion which presently took place in the station at Louisville. A tall, slender gentleman of a youngish Confederate colonel type--gray mustache and imperial, with a soft hat set very slightly to one side of his handsome head--detached himself from the crowd with a cry of, "Here I am, Dollykins!" Whereupon the girl dropped all her belongings, and cast herself upon him speechless, to be lifted well off the ground and hugged and kissed very thoroughly. "Fine! She's got a father, anyway, and a bully old bird at that," thought the young man, who had never owned either father or mother or much of anything else that he could remember. It was his further privilege to hurry after the pair with a suit-case, some magazines, and a box of candy which both had characteristically forgotten. He was thanked by Major Darcy with an affable smile, and by his daughter with a curt, impersonal nod of dismissal after Sister Mary Joseph's best manner; which also pleased him, for he was by no means a thin-skinned young man, and preferred his gentlewomen haughty. He followed the pair far enough to observe the vehicle to which the father was obviously conducting her. "Humph!" he said to himself; "rich people!" and turned away, rather disappointed. (Why this should be, the writer cannot say, being merely a chronicler of facts.) Joan's flow of excited babble paused as she herself saw this vehicle. "Goodness! Are we going home in a taxicab? What grandeur!" she murmured, mentally figuring out the tariff. Then the monogram on the door enlightened her. "Oh, it's Mrs. Calloway's," she said, relieved, a little ashamed to have quite forgotten the existence of their well-meaning neighbor. "How good of her to send it for me!" she added with a giggle, recalling her recent game of Pretend. "All you need to do to complete the picture, Daddy, is to say, 'Home, James!'" Major Darcy obligingly murmured, "Home, James!" The chauffeur touched his cap, and enclosed them in the perfumed elegance of the limousine.