s a baby's cooing chuckle that arrested the little brown shoes upon
the verge of a deep sand hollow. Lynette looked down. A pearly-pale cup
fringed with blazing poppies held the lost treasure of some weeping
mother--a flaxen-headed coquette of some eighteen months old, arrayed in
expensive, diaphanous, now sadly crumpled whiteness, the divine human
peach served up in whipped cream of muslin and frothy Valenciennes.
Absorbed in delightful sand-dabbling, Miss Baby crowed and gurgled; then,
as a little cry of womanly delight in her beauty and womanly pity for her
isolation broke from Lynette, she looked up and laughed roguishly in the
stranger's face, narrowing her eyes.

Naughty, mischievous eyes of jewel-bright, grey-green, long-shaped and
thick-lashed; bold red, laughing mouth--where had Lynette seen them
before? With a strange sense of renewing an experience she ran down into
the hollow, and dropping on her knees beside the pretty thing, caught it
up and kissed it soundly.

"Where do you come from, sweet?" she asked, between the kisses. "Where are
mother and nurse?"

"Ga!" said the baby. Then, with a sudden puckering of pearly-golden brows,
and a little querulous cry of impatience, the Hon. Alyse Rosabel Tobart
squirmed out of the arms that held her, exhibiting in the process the most
cherubic of pink legs, and the loveliest silk socks and kid shoes, and
wriggled back into her sandy nest. Once re-established there, she answered
no more questions, but with truly aristocratic composure resumed her
interrupted task of stuffing a costly bonnet of embroidered cambric and
quilled lace with sand. When the bonnet would hold no more, she had
arranged to fill her shoe: she was perfectly clear upon the point of
having no other engagement so absorbing.

Smiling, Lynette abandoned the attempt to question. Perhaps the missing
guardians of this lost jewel were quite near after all, sitting with books
and work and other babies in the shelter of some neighbouring hollow, from
whence this daring adventurer had escaped unseen.... She ran up the steep
side where the frieze of poppies nodded against the sky, and the white
sand streamed back from under the little brown shoes that had trodden upon
Saxham's heart so heavily.

No one was near. Only in the distance, toiling over the dry waves of the
sand-dunes towards the steep ascent by which the hilly main street of
Herion may be gained, went a white perambulator, canopied with white, and