"You know you're the worst spoiled child in Oldham County." "Whose fault is it ?" retorted Lloyd, with a final pinch as she liberated his ears and darted away.

"Ask Colonel George Lloyd.

If there was any spoiling done, he did it." Two hours later, still in the gayest of spirits, Lloyd and Betty raced down the avenue to meet their guests, and tired and travel-stained as the newcomers were, the impetuous greeting gave them a sense of having been caught up into a gay whirl of some kind.

It gave them an excited thrill which presaged all sorts of delightful things about to happen.
The courtly bows of the old Colonel, standing between the great white pillars, Mrs.Sherman's warm welcome, and Mom Beck's old-time curtseys, seemed to usher them into a fascinating story-book sort of life, far more interesting than any Mary had yet read.
Several hours later, sitting in the long drawing-room, she wondered if she could be the same girl who one short week before was chasing across the desert like a Comanche Indian, beating the bushes for rattlesnakes, or washing dishes in the hot little kitchen of the Wigwam.

Here in the soft light shed from many waxen tapers in the silver candelabra, surrounded by fine old ancestral portraits, and furniture that shone with the polish of hospitable generations, Mary felt civilized down to her very finger-tips: so thoroughly a lady, through and through, that the sensation sent a warm thrill over her.
That feeling had begun soon after her arrival, when Mom Beck ushered her into a luxurious bathroom.