ompliment," he said. "I never knew her to say that
except to a long-time patient of mine that stayed a long time (more's
the pity!) with them. 'Come back,' said Mother to her. 'Come soon,
deary, for the house will miss your grey dress so soft on the floor.'
They would have cured her if anybody could."

"Then you don't consider her cured?" she said with a shock of
disappointment. "I am so sorry. But it is surely a wonderful
place--one can't talk about it, but I see you know."

"Oh, yes, I know," he said briefly. "I saw you would pull through in
great shape there. This patient I spoke of used to tell me that the
duty of her life, here and through Eternity, ought by rights to be the
preaching of the gospel she learned there. Well--maybe it is, for all
we know. If I could have cured her, she would have been a great--a
really great novelist, I think."

"If you could have--" she gasped, seizing his arm, "you mean----"

"I mean that I couldn't," he answered simply. "She died there. I
dreamed of her last night."

THE GYPSY

Very early in the last century, while Napoleon still reigned over
Europe and the people went journeys in post-chaises through England,
John Appleyard, the only son of a thriving Sussex farmer, met, while
walking across one of his father's fields, a troup of gypsies camping
under a hedge. Among them was a dark young woman, very lovely, with
straight, heavy brows and a yard of thick blue-black hair, which she
was drying in the wind at the moment, having washed it in the brook.
John looked at her hard, walked by, turned, looked again, and stood
staring so long that a surly gypsy father slipped a fowling-piece into
his elbow and approached him menacingly.

"My daughter, young sir," he said shortly, "may sleep in a wagon and
not eat off chayny plates as the like o' you do, but I'll have none
eying her like that, be who he may, for she's a good girl, she is, and
the best man that walks is none too good to be her husband!"

"Am I good enough?" says John Appleyard, quietly.

And as a matter of fact he married her in the parish church in three
weeks' time, and his mother cried herself sick.

It was no use trying to live at the farm, after that, for the
neighbours smiled and pointed, and the old farmer was scandalised at
his new relatives, and though he had nothing against his handsome
daughter-in-law personally, felt himself a marked man and counted the
spoons every night. So John, who