added, "I am going away. You won't want to see me or
anyone for a while after you have read this book. But I will come up
to see you to-morrow."

When I went the next day Miss Sylvia herself met me at the door. She
caught my hand and drew me into the hall. Her eyes were softly
radiant.

"Oh, you have made me so happy!" she said tremulously. "Oh, you can
never know how happy! Nothing hurts now--nothing ever can hurt,
because I know he did care."

She laid her face down on my shoulder, as a girl might have nestled to
her lover, and I bent and kissed her for Uncle Alan.

The Garden of Spices

Jims tried the door of the blue room. Yes, it was locked. He had hoped
Aunt Augusta _might_ have forgotten to lock it; but when did Aunt
Augusta forget anything? Except, perhaps, that little boys were not
born grown-ups--and _that_ was something she never remembered. To be
sure, she was only a half-aunt. Whole aunts probably had more
convenient memories.

Jims turned and stood with his back against the door. It was better
that way; he could not imagine things behind him then. And the blue
room was so big and dim that a dreadful number of things could be
imagined in it. All the windows were shuttered but one, and that one
was so darkened by a big pine tree branching right across it that it
did not let in much light.

Jims looked very small and lost and lonely as he shrank back against
the door--so small and lonely that one might have thought that even
the sternest of half-aunts should have thought twice before shutting
him up in that room and telling him he must stay there the whole
afternoon instead of going out for a promised ride. Jims hated being
shut up alone--especially in the blue room. Its bigness and dimness
and silence filled his sensitive little soul with vague horror.
Sometimes he became almost sick with fear in it. To do Aunt Augusta
justice, she never suspected this. If she had she would not have
decreed this particular punishment, because she knew Jims was delicate
and must not be subjected to any great physical or mental strain. That
was why she shut him up instead of whipping him. But how was she to
know it? Aunt Augusta was one of those people who never know anything
unless it is told them in plain language and then hammered into their
heads. There was no one to tell her but Jims, and Jims would have died
the death before he would have told Aunt Augusta, with her cold,
spectacled eyes and thin, smil