you to draw the obvious inference!"

Ruby, who had been roving about the room during this conversation, now
broke in:

"Mummy," she cried, "there's a letter here for you, and it looks like
darling Queen Daphne's writing!" And she brought it to her mother. It
was enclosed in a folded square of parchment--envelopes, like other
modern conveniences, being unknown in Maerchenland--and fastened with the
royal signet, which Mrs. Wibberley-Stimpson broke with a melancholy
reminiscence of the satisfaction it had given her to use the seal
herself.

"_Dear Mrs. Wibberley-Stimpson_," she read aloud--"_As I am about
to be married here very shortly, my return with you to England will
naturally be impossible. It is a great grief to me to have to part
from my dear little pupil Ruby, to whom I have become so deeply and
sincerely attached. Will you please tell her from me that I shall
never forget her, and miss her very much indeed.--Believe me, very
truly yours,_

DAPHNE HERITAGE."

"Well," commented Mrs. Stimpson, while poor Ruby's tears began to flow
afresh, "that is certainly a letter which I could show to _anybody_.
Though I notice she doesn't say anything about being grieved to part
with anyone but Ruby. A deliberate slight to the rest of us! And then
the meanness of turning us out without the slightest return for all
we've done for her! It _does_ show such petty ingratitude!"

"Easy on, Mater!" said Clarence. "She don't seem to have let us go away
quite empty-handed after all. I mean to say there's a box or something
over there that I fancy I've seen before in the Palace."

He went up to examine it as he spoke. It was an oblong case, rather
deeper and squarer than a backgammon box, covered with faded orange
velvet and fitted with clasps and corners of finely wrought silver set
with precious stones.

Inside were the emerald and opal "halma" board and ruby and diamond
pieces, and with them a slip of parchment with Daphne's handwriting. "_I
thought perhaps_," she had written, "_you might care to have this.
Princess Rapunzelhauser tells me she is afraid two of the men are
missing, but I hope she is mistaken and they are really all there.--D._"

"_I_ shall never play with them!" declared Ruby breaking down once more.
"I--I couldn't bear to, without Her!"

"Of _course_ you will never play with them, my dear," said her mother,
"they are far too valuable for that."

A very inadequate