Her brother bent down and kissed her flushed face.
"And I am glad, too, little sister, for you are a veritable Lee, and one to be proud of."
Carolina felt herself grow warm in every fibre of her being over the first compliment which had ever reached her heart.
Sherman was still holding her hand, and she pressed his fingers gratefully.
"I will look up the papers to-morrow, and let you know the moment I discover anything. I can easily guess what your plan is, but--without money?"
"Thank you, brother. And in the meantime I shall go to stay with Kate."
Again the slight lift to Sherman’s eyebrows.
"You will doubtless be happier there," he said, quietly.
But when Carolina was comfortably established in the suite of rooms which Kate had joyfully placed at her disposal, she found that she could neither fix her attention on the new decorations of which Kate was so inordinately proud, nor could she wrench her mind from the subject of Guildford.
She had been so stunned by the knowledge, not that the estate was mortgaged, but that it had been parted with so lightly, with little thought and less regret, that she had not been able, nor had she wished to express to Sherman her intense feeling in the matter. The more she thought, the more she believed that some turn of the wheel would bring Guildford back. If it were only mortgaged and not sold, she felt that her yearning was so strong she even dared to think of assuming the indebtedness and taking years, if need be, to free the place and restore the home of her fathers.
Her intimacy with her father had steeped her in the traditions of Guildford. The mere fact of their having lived abroad seemed to have accentuated in Captain Lee’s mind his love for his native State, and no historian knew better the history of South Carolina than did this little expatriated American girl, Carolina Lee. By the hour these two would pace the long drawing-rooms and discuss this and that famous act or chivalric deed, Carolina’s inflammable patriotism readily bursting into an ardent flame from a spark from her father’s scintillant descriptions. She fluently translated everything into French for her governess, and to this day, Mademoiselle Beaupré thinks that every large city in the Union is situated in South Carolina, that the President lives in Charleston, and that Fort Sumter protects everything in America except the Pacific Coast.