Katrine: A Novel
great man he is to-day.

And two things linger with me—the first a conversation between Dermott and Katrine at the Countess de Nemours'.

"Tell me," said Katrine: "do you think any woman ever married the man who was kindest to her?"

"It's unrecorded if it ever occurred," Dermott answered.

And a second, the truth of which is less open to dispute.

"Nora," Katrine asked, "could you ever have loved any but Dennis-your first love?"

"No," answered Nora. "To an Irishwoman the drame comes but the wance."

E.M.L.

KATRINE

 I

UNDER THE SOUTHERN PINES

Ravenel Plantation occupies a singular rise of wooded land in North Carolina, between Way-Home River, Loon Mountain, and the Silver Fork. The road which leads from Charlotte toward the south branches by the Haunted Hollow, the right fork going to Carlisle and the left following the rushing waters of the Way-Home River to the very gate-posts of Ravenel Plantation, through which the noisy water runs.

Ravenel Mansion, which stands a good three miles from the north gate of the plantation, is approached by a driveway of stately pines. The main part is built of gray stone, like a fort, with mullioned windows, the yellow glass of early colonial times still in the upper panes. But the show-places of the plantation are the south wing (added by Francis Ravenel the fourth), and the great south gateway, bearing the carved inscription: "Guests are Welcome."

Long ago, when Charles II. was on his way to be crowned, a certain English Ravenel—Foulke by name—had the good-luck to fall in with that impulsive monarch, and for no further service than the making of a rhyme, vile in meter and villainous as to truth-telling, to receive from him an earldom and a grant of "certain lands beyond the seas."


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