“The uniforms were a day late,” Starbuck lied. In truth his dinner with Thaddeus Bird and the beguiling Belvedere Delaney had stretched from the early afternoon to late suppertime, and so the petticoats had not been bought till late Saturday morning, but it hardly seemed politic to admit to such dalliance.

“Well, you’re here now,” Anna said as she drew Starbuck into the sunlight, “and I’m so glad. Adam has talked so much about you.”

“He often spoke of you,” Starbuck said gallantly and untruthfully, for in fact Adam had rarely spoken of his sister, and never with great fondness.

“You surprise me. Adam usually spends so much time examining his own conscience that he scarcely notices the existence of other people.” Anna, thus revealing a more astringent mind than Starbuck had expected, nevertheless blushed, as if apologizing for her apparently harsh judgment. “My brother is a Faulconer to the core,” she explained. “He is not very practical.”

“Your father is practical, surely?”

“He’s a dreamer,” Anna said, “a romantic. He believes that all fine things will come true if we just have enough hope.”

“And surely this house was not built by mere hopes?” Starbuck waved toward the generous facade of Seven Springs.

“You like the house?” Anna sounded surprised. “Mother and I are trying to persuade Father to pull it down and build something altogether grander. Something Italian, perhaps, with columns and a dome? I would like to have a pillared temple on a hill in the garden. Something surrounded by flowers, and very grand.”

“I think the house is lovely as it is,” Starbuck said.

Anna made a face to show her disapproval of Starbuck’s taste. “Our great-great-grandfather Adam built it, or most of it. He was very practical, but then his son married a French lady and the family blood became ethereal. That’s what Mother says. And she’s not strong either, so her blood didn’t help.”

“Adam doesn’t seem ethereal.”

“Oh, he is,” Anna said, then she smiled up at Starbuck. “I do so like northern voices. They sound so much cleverer than our country accents. Would you permit me to paint you? I’m not so good a painter as Ethan, but I work harder at it. You can sit beside the Faulconer River and look melancholy, like an exile beside the waters of Babylon.”

“You’d like me to hang my harp upon the willows?” Starbuck jested clumsily.

Anna withdrew her arm and clapped her hands with delight. “You will be marvelous company, Everyone else is so dull. Adam is being pious in the North, Father is besotted with soldiering, and Mother spends all day wrapped in ice.”

“In ice?”