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 before-mentioned 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 Honora had likewise seen:  one end of a rose-covered villa—­which Honora thought was a wing of his palace; a coach and four he was driving, and which had chanced to belong to an Englishman, although the photograph gave no evidence of this ownership.  Neither Aunt Mary nor Uncle Tom had ever sought—­for reasons perhaps obvious—­to correct the child’s impression of an extraordinary paternity.