The plantation had never seemed so beautiful to him.  The wild roses were in bloom; the fringe-trees and dogwood hung white along the riverbanks; the golden azaleas, nodding wake-robins, and muskadine flowers looked up at them from below, while the cotton spread its green tufts miles and miles away to a sunlit horizon.

Swinging along the road outside the park, the half-formed plan to visit the overseer left him, and purposeless he climbed the hill to Chestnut Ridge.  Something in the occasion of his home-coming after a two years’ absence—­his mother’s reference to his marriage, his remembrances of Anne Lennox—­had brought back to his face its habitual expression of sadness.  And more than he would have acknowledged was a disquietude caused by his instant resentment of the existence of Dermott McDermott.  Never in his life had he felt more strongly the need for companionship.  He had been loved by many women.  He had never been believed in by any.

Passionate, proud, intolerant, full of prejudice, conscious by twenty-six years’ experience of a most magnetic power with women, he came to the edge of the far wood as lawless a man, in as lawless a mood, as the Carolinas had ever seen—­a locality where lawless men have not been wanting.

Suddenly, through the twilight, he heard a voice—­a woman’s voice—­singing, and by instinct he knew that the singer was alone and conscious of nothing save the song.

At the top of the rise, under a group of beeches, with both arms stretched along a bar fence, a girl stood, the black of her hair in silhouette against the gold of the sky.  He noted the slender grace of her body as she leaned backward, and listened to her voice, Heaven-given, vibrant, caressing—­juste, as the French have it—­singing an old song.

He had heard it hundreds of times cheapened by lack of temperament, lack of voice, lack of taste; but as he listened, though little versed in music, he knew that it was a great voice that sang it and a great personality which interpreted it.  With the song still trembling through the silence the singer turned toward him, and, man of the world and many loves as he had been, an unknown feeling came at sight of her.

A flower of a girl—­“of fire and dew,” delicate features, nose tip-tilted, a chin firmly modelled under the rounded flesh, and eyes bright with the wonder and pride of life.  She wore a short-waisted black frock, scant of skirt and cut away at the neck.  It was in this same frock that the Sargent picture of her was painted—­but that was years afterward; and although she was motionless, one knew from her slender figure and arched feet that she moved with fire and spirit.  Her hair was very dark, though red showed through it in a strong light, and her cheeks had the dusky pink of an October peach.  But it was the eyes that held and allowed no forgetting; Ravenel always held they were violet, and Josef, who saw her every day for years, spoke them