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“What! is that gypsy child twenty-one?” exclaimed the doctor in surprise, pushing back his chair so as to pull Tatters’ head between his knees and stroke his ears, at the same time that he drew his coffee cup toward him, sniffing the subtle aroma, only second in his nostrils to that of the fresh earth in spring and his beloved pipe. “It seems but a year or so since she was roving about the lane with her hair flying and Tatters after her,—the two were inseparable.”

“Twenty-one! Why, Dr. Russell, that time was eight years ago, the second autumn you came up to hunt with Silent Stead. She’s turned twenty-four, and that Tatters was this one’s uncle; they say there has been a dog of the name in the family this hundred years and more.

“Yes, Brooke was twenty-four last May, and it seems now that they should call her by her rightful Christian name, Pamela, instead of that absurd one that might as well be stick or stone. You did not know she had any other? Oh, it is her middle name to be sure—Pamela Brooke Lawton. Her mother was one of the proud old Virginia Brookes, and they say, failing of male heirs in the South, they often call a daughter by her mother’s maiden name. Mannish and affected though, I call it, still I must own it did suit her eight years ago, for she had as many ways and turns and deep and shallow places as that little stream on Windy Hill that begins in only a thread that wouldn’t move a fern, and then widens to the Glen Mill-pond, and saws all the wood hereabouts and grinds the flour for Gilead.