and its master gazed at it with a pang in his heart. It was his,
and he could not save it. He turned away and walked slowly to the
garden, and stood a moment as he had stood last May, with his hand on
the stone gateway. It was very silent and lonely here, in the hush of
winter; nothing stirred; even the shadows of the interlaced branches
above lay almost motionless across the walks.

Something moved to his left, down the pathway--he turned to look. Had
his heart stopped, that he felt this strange, cold feeling in his
breast? Were his eyes--could he be seeing? Was this insanity? Fifty feet
down the path, half in the weaving shadows, half in clear sunlight,
stood the little boy of his life-long vision, in the dress with the
black velvet squares, his little uncle, dead forty years ago. As he
gazed, his breath stopping, the child smiled and held up to him, as of
old, a key on a scarlet string, and turned and flitted as if a flower
had taken wing, away between the box hedges. Philip, his feet moving as
if without his will, followed him. Again the baby face turned its
smiling dark eyes toward him, and Philip knew that the child was calling
him, though there was no sound; and again without volition of his own
his feet took him where it led. He felt his breath coming difficultly,
and suddenly a gasp shook him--there was no footprint on the unfrozen
earth where the vision had passed. Yet there before him, moving through
the deep sunlit silence of the garden, was the familiar, sturdy little
form in its old-world dress. Philip's eyes were open; he was awake,
walking; he saw it. Across the neglected tangle it glided, and into the
trim order of Shelby's rose garden; in the opening between the box walls
it wheeled again, and the sun shone clear on the bronze hair and fresh
face, and the scarlet string flashed and the key glinted at the end of
it. Philip's fascinated eyes saw all of that. Then the apparition
slipped into the shadow of the beech trees and Philip quickened his step
breathlessly, for it seemed that life and death hung on the sight. In
and out through the trees it moved; once more the face turned toward
him; he caught the quick brightness of a smile. The little chap had
disappeared behind the broad tree-trunk, and Philip, catching his
breath, hurried to see him appear again. He was gone. The little spirit
that had strayed from over the border of a world--who can say how far,
how near?--unafraid in this earth-corner once it