Warwick's residence was situated¹ in the outskirts² of the town. It was a fine old plantation³ house, built in colonial times, with a stately colonnade⁴, wide verandas⁵, and long windows with Venetian blinds. It was painted white, and stood back several rods from the street, in a charming setting of palmettoes, magnolias, and flowering shrubs⁶. Rena had always thought her mother's house large, but now it seemed cramped⁷ and narrow, in comparison with this roomy mansion⁸. The furniture was old-fashioned and massive. The great brass⁹ andirons on the wide hearth¹⁰ stood like sentinels proclaiming and guarding the dignity of the family. The spreading antlers on the wall testified to a mighty¹¹ hunter in some past generation. The portraits of Warwick's wife's ancestors—high featured, proud men and women, dressed in the fashions of a bygone age—looked down from tarnished¹² gilt¹³ frames. It was all very novel to her, and very impressive. When she ate off china, with silver knives and forks that had come down as heirlooms, escaping somehow the ravages¹⁴ and exigencies¹⁵ of the war time,—Warwick told her afterwards how he had buried them out of reach of friend or foe,—she thought that her brother must be wealthy, and she felt very proud of him and of her opportunity. The servants, of whom there were several in the house, treated her with a deference¹⁶ to which her eight months in school had only partly accustomed her. At school she had been one of many to be served, and had herself been held to obedience¹⁷. Here, for the first time in her life, she was mistress, and tasted the sweets of power.  
The household consisted of her brother and herself, a cook, a coachman, a nurse, and her brother's little son Albert. The child, with a fine instinct, had put out his puny¹⁸ arms to Rena at first sight, and she had clasped the little man to her bosom¹⁹ with a motherly caress²⁰. She had always loved weak creatures. Kittens and puppies had ever found a welcome and a meal at Rena's hands, only to be chased away by Mis' Molly, who had had a wider experience. No shiftless poor white, no half-witted or hungry negro, had ever gone unfed from Mis' Molly's kitchen door if Rena were there to hear his plaint. Little Albert was pale and sickly when she came, but soon bloomed again in the sunshine of her care, and was happy only in her presence. Warwick found pleasure in their growing love for each other, and was glad to perceive that the child formed a living link to connect her with his home.
 
"Dat chile sutt'nly do lub Miss Rena, an' dat's a fac', sho 's you bawn," remarked 'Lissa the cook to Mimy the nurse one day. "You'll get yo' nose put out er j'int, ef you don't min'."
 
"I ain't frettin', honey," laughed the nurse good-naturedly. She was not at all jealous. She had the same wages as before, and her labors²¹ were materially lightened by the aunt's attention to the child. This gave Mimy much more time to flirt²² with Tom the coachman.
 
It was a source of much gratification to Warwick that his sister seemed to adapt herself so easily to the new conditions. Her graceful²³ movements, the quiet elegance²⁴ with which she wore even the simplest gown, the easy authoritativeness²⁵ with which she directed the servants, were to him proofs of superior quality, and he felt correspondingly proud of her. His feeling for her was something more than brotherly love,—he was quite conscious that there were degrees in brotherly love, and that if she had been homely²⁶ or stupid, he would never have disturbed her in the stagnant²⁷ life of the house behind the cedars²⁸. There had come to him from some source, down the stream of time, a rill of the Greek sense of proportion, of fitness, of beauty, which is indeed but proportion embodied²⁹, the perfect adaptation of means to ends. He had perceived, more clearly than she could have appreciated it at that time, the undeveloped elements of discord³⁰ between Rena and her former life. He had imagined her lending grace and charm to his own household. Still another motive³¹, a purely³² psychological one, had more or less consciously influenced him. He had no fear that the family secret would ever be discovered,—he had taken his precautions too thoroughly³³, he thought, for that; and yet he could not but feel, at times, that if peradventure—it was a conceivable hypothesis—it should become known, his fine social position would collapse³⁴ like a house of cards. Because of this knowledge, which the world around him did not possess, he had felt now and then a certain sense of loneliness; and there was a measure of relief in having about him one who knew his past, and yet whose knowledge, because of their common interest, would not interfere³⁵ with his present or jeopardize³⁶ his future. For he had always been, in a figurative sense, a naturalized foreigner in the world of wide opportunity, and Rena was one of his old compatriots, whom he was glad to welcome into the populous³⁷ loneliness of his adopted country.