hears broke her heart. The Little Girl had always loved her soft,
shining hair. It had been like a beautiful thing apart from her, that
she could caress and pet. She had made an idol of it, having nothing
else to love.

When it was all shorn off she crept out of the room without opening
her eyes. After that the gardener's little boy's best clothes came
easier to her, she found. And she could whoop and leap and whistle a
little better. It was almost as if she had really made herself the
Boy she should have been.

Then the Shining Mother came, and the Ogre. The Little Girl--I mean
the Boy--was waiting for them, swinging her--his--feet from a high
branch of the Golden Pippin tree. He was whistling.

"But I think I am going to die," he thought, behind the whistle. "I'm
certain I am. I feel it coming on."

Of course, after a little, there was a hunt everywhere for the Little
Girl. Even little girls cannot slip out of existence like that,
undiscovered. The beautiful green expanses were hunted over and over,
but only a gardener's little boy in his best clothes, whistling
faintly, was found. He fell out of the Golden Pippin tree as the
field-servants went by, and they stopped to carry his limp little
figure to the gardener's lodge. Then the hunt went forward again. The
Shining Mother grew faint and sick with fear, and the Ogre strode
about like one demented. It was hardly what was to be expected of the
Shining Mother and the Ogre.

Towards night the mystery was partly solved. It was the Shining
Mother who found the connecting threads. She found the little, jagged
locks of soft, sweet hair. The Ogre came upon her sitting on the
floor among them, and the whiteness of her face terrified him.

"I know--you need not tell me what has happened!" she said, scarcely
above a whisper, as if in the presence of the dead. "A door in me has
opened, and I see it all--_all_, I tell you! We have never had
her,--and now, dear God in heaven, we have lost her!"

It was very nearly so. They could hardly know then how near it came
to being true. Link by link they came upon the little chain of
pitiful proofs. They found all the little, sweet, white girl-clothes
folded neatly by themselves and laid in a pile together, as if on an
altar for sacrifice. If the Little Girl had written "Good-bye" in her
childish scrawl upon them, the Shining Mother would not have better
understood. So many things she was seeing beyond that open door.

They found t