and spoiling views—” Then gazing dreamily towards the touch of blue sea. “Well, I guess the Lord made N’Yorkers same as he made you and me. His ways are inscrutable and past finding out; so’r the ways of some of his creatures.”

She turned from the window, and her eye fell on the great chest by the other window.

Going to it, she opened the lid.

It was full of old toys, mostly broken. She seemed to have forgotten the presence of Phyl. Holding the chest’s lid open, she gazed at the coloured and futile contents.

Then she closed the lid of the chest with a sigh.

105

CHAPTER III

The South dines at four o’clock—at least Charleston does.

It was the old English custom and the old Irish custom, too.

In the reign of William the Conqueror people dined at eleven a.m. or was it ten? Then, as civilisation advanced, the dinner hour stole forward. In the time of the Georges it reached four o’clock. In Ireland, the most conservative country on earth, some people even still sit down to table at four—in Charleston every one does.

a.m.

One would not change the custom for worlds, just as one would not change the old box pews of St. Michael’s or replace the cannon on the Battery with modern ordinance.

Richard Pinckney did not dine at home that day. He was dining with the Rhetts in Calhoun Street, so Miss Pinckney said as they sat down to table. She sniffed as she said it, for the Rhetts, though one of the best families in the town, were people not of her way of thinking. The two Rhett girls had each a motor-car of her own and drove it—abomination!

The automobile ranked in her mind with the telephone as an invention of the devil.

Phyl had not seen Richard Pinckney since the 106 morning and now he was dining out. Her heart had warmed to him at the station on the way to Vernons, and at breakfast he had appeared to her as a quite different person to the 

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