ers. And
as one played one loved...

"But--it's odd--there's a gap in my memory. I don't remember the games we
played. I never remembered. Afterwards, as a child, I spent long hours
trying, even with tears, to recall the form of that happiness. I wanted to
play it all over again--in my nursery--by myself. No! All I remember is
the happiness and two dear playfellows who were most with me... Then
presently came a sombre dark woman, with a grave, pale face and dreamy
eyes, a sombre woman, wearing a soft long robe of pale purple, who carried
a book, and beckoned and took me aside with her into a gallery above a
hall--though my playmates were loth to have me go, and ceased their game
and stood watching as I was carried away. Come back to us!' they cried.
'Come back to us soon!' I looked up at her face, but she heeded them not
at all. Her face was very gentle and grave. She took me to a seat in the
gallery, and I stood beside her, ready to look at her book as she opened
it upon her knee. The pages fell open. She pointed, and I looked,
marvelling, for in the living pages of that book I saw myself; it was a
story about myself, and in it were all the things that had happened to me
since ever I was born...

"It was wonderful to me, because the pages of that book were not pictures,
you understand, but realities."

Wallace paused gravely--looked at me doubtfully.

"Go on," I said. "I understand."

"They were realities---yes, they must have been; people moved and things
came and went in them; my dear mother, whom I had near forgotten; then my
father, stern and upright, the servants, the nursery, all the familiar
things of home. Then the front door and the busy streets, with traffic to
and fro. I looked and marvelled, and looked half doubtfully again into the
woman's face and turned the pages over, skipping this and that, to see
more of this book and more, and so at last I came to myself hovering and
hesitating outside the green door in the long white wall, and felt again
the conflict and the fear.

"'And next?' I cried, and would have turned on, but the cool hand of the
grave woman delayed me.

"'Next?' I insisted, and struggled gently with her hand, pulling up her
fingers with all my childish strength, and as she yielded and the page
came over she bent down upon me like a shadow and kissed my brow.

"But the page did not show the enchanted garden, nor the panthers, nor the
girl who had led me by the hand, nor the playfello