Southern Hearts

It was a beautiful morning of early October in the mountain region of Virginia. The old Fitzhugh homestead, now the property of an Englishman who had married the only daughter of the impoverished family and bought in the home from creditors with good British gold, reared its dull red sides from amid a mass of sugar maples, larches and sycamore trees, and seemed with its widely opened doors, to proclaim an endless hospitality. The passer-by caught a glimpse of rambling out-houses whose chimneys shed lazy wreaths of smoke from pine wood fires, and if near enough he might have sniffed the pleasant odor of savory cookery from the rear building where Aunt Rose, the old-time cook, exercised her skill to please her epicure master, or tempt the less robust appetite of her young mistress.

Mrs. Meeks stood at this moment in the middle of the sitting-room, her arms clasped over a broom, and her dark eyes gazing upon the floor in front of her. But her meditations had nothing to do with the rug where the broom rested, nor yet with the sun-lit slope of the Blue Ridges that extended in all their wealth of autumn beauty in front of the open windows.

She was thinking of Mr. Meeks. He had just left the house, and as not infrequently happened, had left the sting of sharp words behind him. Yet, not exactly sharp, either. Overbearing, dogmatical words, not intentionally cutting ones, for that was not the nature of the man; but words that, said in his tone of command, bore heavily upon sensitive feelings.

Mrs. Meeks was sensitive. That was evident in every line of her softly rounded face, but the red lips that were curved in Cupid's bow could straighten and stiffen when she was roused into one of her rare moods of determination. Mr. Meeks called these moods "tantrums," although his wife always spoke low and never lost her good manners. She had been reared by a grandmother who was one of the last of the Southern dames of the ancien régime, and would have died before she would have condescended to a rough and vulgar quarrel.