you wanted something very badly and
there was no chance of your getting it,--your money would buy all you
could desire. It would even buy you a man!"

Morgana paused in the act of pouring out a second cup of coffee, and
her face dimpled with amusement.

"Buy me a man!" she echoed--"You think it would?"

"Of course it would!" Manella averred--"If you wanted one, which I
daresay you don't. For all I know, you may be like the man who is
living in the consumption hut on the hill,--he ought to have a woman,
but he doesn't want one."

Morgana buttered her little breakfast roll very delicately.

"The man who lives in the consumption hut on the hill!" she repeated,
slowly, and with a smile--"What man is that?"

"I don't know--" and Manella's large dark eyes filled with a strangely
wistful perplexity. "He is a stranger--and he's not ill at all. He is
big and strong and healthy. But he has chosen to live in the 'house of
the dying,' as it is sometimes called--where people from the Plaza go
when there's no more hope for them. He likes to be quite alone--he
thinks and writes all day. I take him milk and bread,--it is all he
orders from the Plaza. I would be his woman. I would work for him from
morning till night. But he will not have me."

Morgana raised her eyes, glittering with the "fey" light in them that
often bewildered and rather scared her friends.

"You would be his woman? You are in love with him?" she said.

Something in her look checked Manella's natural impulse to confide in
one of her own sex.

"No, I am not!"--she answered coldly--"I have said too much."

Morgana smiled, and stretching out her small white hand, adorned with
its sparkling rings, laid it caressingly on the girl's brown wrist.

"You are a dear!"--she murmured, lazily--"Just a dear! A big, beautiful
creature with a heart! That's the trouble--your heart! You've found a
man living selfishly alone, scribbling what he perhaps thinks are the
most wonderful things ever put on paper, when they are very likely
nothing but rubbish, and it enters into your head that he wants
mothering and loving! He doesn't want anything of the sort! And YOU
want to love and mother him! Oh heavens!--have you ever thought what
loving and mothering mean?"

Manella drew a quick soft breath.

"All the world, surely!" she answered, with emotion--"To love!--to
possess the one we love, body and soul!--and to mother a life born of
such love!--THAT must be heaven!"

The