A Modern Chronicle | Page 4

I were only too glad to do what we could."
"We feel very grateful to you," said Aunt Mary, quietly.
Mrs. Holt looked at her with a still more distinct approval, being
tolerably sure that Mrs. Thomas Leffingwell understood. She had

cleared her skirts of any possible implication of intimacy with the late
Mrs. Randolph, and done so with a master touch.
In the meantime Honora had passed to Uncle Tom. After securing the
little trunk, and settling certain matters with Mr. Holt, they said good-
by to her late kind protectors, and started off for the nearest street- cars,
Honora pulling Uncle Tom's mustache. More than one pedestrian
paused to look back at the tall man carrying the beautiful child,
bedecked like a young princess, and more than one passenger in the
street cars smiled at them both.

CHAPTER II
PERDITA RECALLED
Saint Louis, or that part of it which is called by dealers in real estate the
choice residence section, grew westward. And Uncle Tom might be
said to have been in the vanguard of the movement. In the days before
Honora was born he had built his little house on what had been a farm
on the Olive Street Road, at the crest of the second ridge from the river.
Up this ridge, with clanking traces, toiled the horse-cars that carried
Uncle Tom downtown to the bank and Aunt Mary to market.
Fleeing westward, likewise, from the smoke, friends of Uncle Tom's
and Aunt Mary's gradually surrounded them--building, as a rule, the
high Victorian mansions in favour at that period, which were placed in
the centre of commodious yards. For the friends of Uncle Tom and
Aunt Mary were for the most part rich, and belonged, as did they, to the
older families of the city. Mr. Dwyer's house, with its picture gallery,
was across the street.
In the midst of such imposing company the little dwelling which
became the home of our heroine sat well back in a plot that might
almost be called a garden. In summer its white wooden front was nearly
hidden by the quivering leaves of two tall pear trees. On the other side
of the brick walk, and near the iron fence, was an elm and a flower bed

that was Uncle Tom's pride and the admiration of the neighbourhood.
Honora has but to shut her eyes to see it aflame with tulips at Eastertide.
The eastern wall of the house was a mass of Virginia creeper, and
beneath that another flower bed, and still another in the back-yard
behind the lattice fence covered with cucumber vine. There were,
besides, two maples and two apricot trees, relics of the farm, and of
blessed memory. Such apricots! Visions of hot summer evenings come
back, with Uncle Tom, in his seersucker coat, with his green
watering-pot, bending over the beds, and Aunt Mary seated upright in
her chair, looking up from her knitting with a loving eye.
Behind the lattice, on these summer evenings, stands the militant figure
of that old retainer, Bridget the cook, her stout arms akimbo, ready to
engage in vigorous banter should Honora deign to approach.
"Whisht, 'Nora darlint, it's a young lady yell be soon, and the beaux a-
comin' 'round!" she would cry, and throw back her head and laugh until
the tears were in her eyes.
And the princess, a slim figure in an immaculate linen frock with red
ribbons which Aunt Mary had copied from Longstreth's London
catalogue, would reply with dignity:
"Bridget, I wish you would try to remember that my name is Honora."
Another spasm of laughter from Bridget.
"Listen to that now!" she would cry to another ancient retainer, Mary
Ann, the housemaid, whose kitchen chair was tilted up against the side
of the woodshed. "It'll be Miss Honora next, and George Hanbury here
to-day with his eye through a knothole in the fence, out of his head for
a sight of ye."
George Hanbury was Honora's cousin, and she did not deem his
admiration a subject fit for discussion with Bridget.
"Sure," declared Mary Ann, "it's the air of a princess the child has."

That she should be thought a princess did not appear at all remarkable
to Honora at twelve years of age. Perdita may have had such dreams.
She had been born, she knew, in some wondrous land by the shores of
the summer seas, not at all like St. Louis, and friends and relatives had
not hesitated to remark in her hearing that she resembled--her
father,--that handsome father who surely must have been a prince,
whose beforementioned photograph in the tortoise-shell frame was on
the bureau in her little room. So far as Randolph Leffingwell was
concerned, photography had not been invented for nothing. Other
records of him remained which