The Storm Centre by Mary Noailles Murfree — Read

Miss Mildred Fisher was one of the happiest of women, and this was the result of her own peculiar temperament, although she enjoyed the endowments of a kind fate, for she came of a good family and had a fine fortune in expectation. Her resolute intention was to make the best of everything. With a strong, fresh, buoyant physique and an indomitable spirit it became evident to her in the early stages of this effort that the world is a fairly pleasant planet to live on. Her red hair -- a capital defect in those days, when Titian's name was never associated with anything so unfashionable, and which bowed to the earth the soul of many an otherwise deserving damsel -- was most skilfully manipulated, and dressed in fleecy billows, usually surmounted with an elaborate comb of carved tortoise-shell, but on special occasions with a cordon of very fine pearls, as if to attract the attention that other flame-haired people avoided by the humblest coiffure. By reason of this management it was described sometimes as auburn, and even golden, but this last was the aberration usually of youths who had lost their own heads, red and otherwise, for Mildred was a bewildering coquette. She had singularly fine hazel eyes, which she used rather less for the purpose of vision than for the destruction of the peace of man. Her complexion of that delicate fairness so often concomitant of red hair did not present the usual freckles.

In fact it was the subject of much solicitous care. She wore so many veils and mufflers that her identity often might well be a matter of doubt as far as her features could be discerned, and Seymour, being a very glib young lieutenant, once facetiously threatened her with arrest for going masked and presumably entertaining designs pernicious to the welfare of the army. That she did entertain such designs, in a different sense, was indeed obvious, for with her determination to make the best of everything, Miss Fisher had resolved to harass the heart of the invader the moment a personable man with a creditable letter of introduction presented himself. For she "received the Yankees," as the phrase went, while others closed their doors and steeled their hearts in bitterness.