all strong and hearty. These went to school, survived the
rigors of "regents" examinations, and were beginning to talk of
"accepting" positions. There would never be any position for little
Gargoyle, as John Strang called him, to "accept."

"Let the child run about," the village doctors had advised. "Let him run
about in the sun and make himself useful."

But people who "run about in the sun" are seldom inclined to make
themselves useful, and no one could make Gargoyle so. It would have been
as well to try to train woodbine to draw water or to educate cattails to
write Greek. The little boy spent all of the day idling; it was a
curious, Oriental sort of idling. Callers at Heartholm grew
disapprovingly accustomed to the sight of the grotesque face and figure
peering through the shrubberies; they shrugged their shoulders
impatiently, coming upon the recumbent child dreamily gazing at his own
reflection in the lily-pond, looking necromantically out from the molten
purple of a wind-blown beech, or standing at gaze in a clump of iris.

Strang with his amused laugh fended off all protest and neighborly
advice.

"That's Gargoyle's special variety of hashish. He lives in a
flower-harem--in a five-year-old Solomon's Song. I've often seen the
irises kowtowing to him, and his attitude toward them is distinctly
personal and lover-like. If that little chap could only talk there would
be some fun, but what Gargoyle thinks would hardly fit itself to
words--besides, then"--Strang twinkled at the idea--"none of us would
fancy having him around with those natural eyes--that undressed little
mind."

It was in good-humored explanations like this that the Strangs managed
to conceal their real interest in Gargoyle. They did not remind people
of their only child, the brave boy of seven, who died before they came
to Mockwood. Under the common sense that set the two instantly to work
building a new home, creating new associations, lay the everlasting pain
of an old life, when, as parents of a son, they had seemed to tread
springier soil, to breathe keener, more vital air. And, though the
Strangs adhered patiently to the recognized technicalities of Mockwood
existence, they never lost sight of a hope, of which, against the
increasing evidence of worldly logic, their human hearts still made
ceaseless frantic attestation.

Very slowly, but very constructively, it had become a fierce though
governed passion with both--to learn something of