ams, and the rain-drops, and
tiny flickering ghosts of moon-rays. For just a moment I saw what the
fairy's eyes were seeing, without knowing what they saw.

And then my mare trod on a dead branch, and all vanished. My fairy was
gone; and there was only little "Connemara," as we called her, nursing
her doll, and smiling up at me from the fern, where she had come to
practise her new school-song.

1911.

VII

THE NIGHTMARE CHILD

I set down here not precisely the words of my friend, the country
doctor, but the spirit of them:

"You know there are certain creatures in this world whom one simply dare
not take notice of, however sorry one may be for them. That has often
been borne in on me. I realised it, I think, before I met that little
girl. I used to attend her mother for varicose veins--one of those women
who really ought not to have children, since they haven't the very least
notion of how to bring them up. The wife of a Sussex agricultural
labourer called Alliner, she was a stout person, with most peculiar
prominent epileptic eyes, such eyes as one usually associates with men
of letters or criminals. And yet there was nothing in her. She was just
a lazy, slatternly, easy-going body, rather given to drink. Her husband
was a thin, dirty, light-hearted fellow, who did his work and offended
nobody. Her eldest daughter, a pretty and capable girl, was wild, got
into various kinds of trouble, and had to migrate, leaving two
illegitimate children behind her with their grandparents. The younger
girl, the child of this story, who was called Emmeline, of all
names--pronounced Em'leen, of course--was just fifteen at the time of my
visits to her mother. She had eyes like a hare's, a mouth which readily
fell open, and brown locks caught back from her scared and knobby
forehead. She was thin, and walked with her head poked a little forward,
and she so manoeuvred her legs and long feet, of which one turned in
rather and seemed trying to get in front of the other, that there was
something clodhopperish in her gait. Once in a way you would see her in
curl-papers, and then indeed she was plain, poor child! She seemed to
have grown up without ever having had the least attention paid to her. I
don't think she was ill-treated--she was simply not treated at all. At
school they had been kind enough, but had regarded her as almost
deficient. Seeing that her father was paid about fifteen shillings a
week, that her mother had no