waking--or rather half waking, as children do--I
thought I saw a figure in white crouching at the foot of my bed. I must
have gone to sleep again; and later, though I cannot say whether the
intervening time was short or long, I opened my eyes to see it still
there; and frightened, I cried out; and my mother rose from her knees.

She laughed, a curious broken laugh, in answer to my questions. "It was
a silly dream I had," she explained "I must have been thinking of the
conjurer we saw. I dreamt that a wicked Magician had spirited you away
from me. I could not find you and was all alone in the world."

She put her arms around me, so tight as almost to hurt me. And thus we
remained until again I must have fallen asleep.

It was towards the close of these same holidays that my mother and I
called upon Mrs. Teidelmann in her great stone-built house at Clapton.
She had sent a note round that morning, saying she was suffering from
terrible headaches that quite took her senses away, so that she was
unable to come out. She would be leaving England in a few days to
travel. Would my mother come and see her, she would like to say good-bye
to her before she went. My mother handed the letter across the table to
my father.

"Of course you will go," said my father. "Poor girl, I wonder what the
cause can be. She used to be so free from everything of the kind."

"Do you think it well for me to go?" said my mother. "What can she have
to say to me?"

"Oh, just to say good-bye," answered my father. "It would look so
pointed not to go."

It was a dull, sombre house without, but one entered through its
commonplace door as through the weed-grown rock into Aladdin's cave. Old
Teidelmann had been a great collector all his life, and his treasures,
now scattered through a dozen galleries, were then heaped there in
curious confusion. Pictures filled every inch of wall, stood propped
against the wonderful old furniture, were even stretched unframed across
the ceilings. Statues gleamed from every corner (a few of the statues
were, I remember, the only things out of the entire collection that Mrs.
Teidelmann kept for herself), carvings, embroideries, priceless china,
miniatures framed in gems, illuminated missals and gorgeously bound
books crowded the room. The ugly little thick-lipped man had surrounded
himself with the beauty of every age, brought from every land. He
himself must have been the only thing cheap and uninteresting to be
found