asked.

"She was so white and dainty, she just looked it."

Orth took the next train for London, and from Lord Teignmouth obtained
the address of the aunt who lived on the family traditions, and a
cordial note of introduction to her. He then spent an hour anticipating,
in a toy shop, the whims and pleasures of a child--an incident of
paternity which his book-children had not inspired. He bought the finest
doll, piano, French dishes, cooking apparatus, and playhouse in the
shop, and signed a check for thirty pounds with a sensation of positive
rapture. Then he took the train for Lancashire, where the Lady Mildred
Mortlake lived in another ancestral home.

Possibly there are few imaginative writers who have not a leaning,
secret or avowed, to the occult. The creative gift is in very close
relationship with the Great Force behind the universe; for aught we
know, may be an atom thereof. It is not strange, therefore, that the
lesser and closer of the unseen forces should send their vibrations to
it occasionally; or, at all events, that the imagination should incline
its ear to the most mysterious and picturesque of all beliefs. Orth
frankly dallied with the old dogma. He formulated no personal faith of
any sort, but his creative faculty, that ego within an ego, had made
more than one excursion into the invisible and brought back literary
treasure.

The Lady Mildred received with sweetness and warmth the generous
contributor to the family sieve, and listened with fluttering interest
to all he had not told the world--she had read the book--and to the
strange, Americanized sequel.

"I am all at sea," concluded Orth. "What had my little girl to do with
the tragedy? What relation was she to the lady who drove the young man
to destruction--?"

"The closest," interrupted Lady Mildred. "She was herself!"

Orth stared at her. Again he had a confused sense of disintegration.
Lady Mildred, gratified by the success of her bolt, proceeded less
dramatically:

"Wally was up here just after I read your book, and I discovered he had
given you the wrong history of the picture. Not that he knew it. It is a
story we have left untold as often as possible, and I tell it to you
only because you would probably become a monomaniac if I didn't. Blanche
Mortlake--that Blanche--there had been several of her name, but there
has not been one since--did not die in childhood, but lived to be
twenty-four. She was an angelic child, but little ange