It was not difficult for the captain to recognize some of the chances to which she alluded; one of them she herself had offered him several times.

“Oh, I am very well off as I am,” he answered, “but perhaps some day I may have something to tell you of the Easterfields and about their doings up on the mountain.”

“About her doin’s, you might as well say,” retorted Miss Port.  “No matter what you tell me, I don’t believe a word about his ever doin’ anything.”  With this she walked to the little phaeton, into which the captain helped her.

“Uncle John,” said Olive, a few minutes later, “are there many people like that in Glenford?”

“My dear child,” said the captain, “the people in Glenford, the most of them, I mean, are just as nice people as you would want to meet.  They are ladies and gentlemen, and they are mighty good company.  They don’t often come out here, to be sure, but I know most of them, and I ought to be ashamed of myself that I have not made you acquainted with them before this.  As to Maria Port, there is only one of her in Glenford, and, so far as I know, there isn’t another just like her in the whole world.  Now I come to think of it,” he continued, “I wonder why some of the young people have not come out to call on you.  But if that Maria Port has been going around telling them that you are a little girl in short frocks it is not so surprising.”

“Oh, don’t bother yourself, Uncle John, about calls and society,” said Olive.  “If you can only manage that that woman takes the shunpike whenever she drives this way, I shall be perfectly satisfied with everything just as it is.”

CHAPTER III

Mrs. Easterfield.

On the side of the mountain, a few miles to the west of the gap to which the turnpike stretched itself, there was a large estate and a large house which had once belonged to the Sudley family.  For a hundred years or more the Sudleys had been important people in this part of the country, but it had been at least two decades since any of them had lived on this estate.  Some of them had gone to cities and towns, and others had married, or in some other fashion had melted away so that their old home knew them no more.

Although it was situated on the borders of the Southern country, the house, which was known as Broadstone, from the fact that a great flat rock on the level of the surrounding turf extended itself for many feet at the front of the principal entrance, was not constructed after ordinary Southern fashions.  Some of the early Sudleys were of English blood and proclivities, and so it was partly like an English house; some of them had taken Continental ideas into the family, and there was a certain solidity about the walls; while here and there the narrowness of the windows suggested southern Europe.  Some parts of the great stone walls had been stuccoed, and some had been whitewashed.  Here and there vines climbed up the walls and stretched themselves under the eaves.  As the house stood on a wide bluff, there was a lawn from which one could see over the tree tops the winding river sparkling far below.  There were gardens and fields on the open slopes, and beyond these the forests rose to the top of the mountains.