fore you go
further--I must tell you all about myself so that you will understand."

The confidence, long sought, was coming, he thought; and he thought
also how little he cared for it now that he was pursuing a greater
thing.

"You know so little about me that I must begin far back--you don't even
know about my aunt--"

"I know something--what you've said, what Mrs. Cole at the Mountain
House told me. She's Mrs. Paula Markham--" his mind went on, "the great
fakir of the spook doctors," but his lips stifled the phrase and said
after a pause, "the great medium."

"I don't like to hear her called that," said Annette. "In spite of what
I'm going to tell you, I never saw but once the thing they call a
medium. That was years ago--but the horrible sacrilege of it has never
left me. She had a part of truth, and she was desecrating it by guesses
and catch words--selling it for money! Aunt Paula is broader than I.
'It's part of the truth,' she said, 'that woman is desecrating the
work, but she's serving in her way.' I suppose so--but since then I've
never liked to hear Aunt Paula called a medium."

She paused a second on this.

"If I were only sure of your sympathy!" A note of pleading fluttered in
her voice.

"No thought of yours, however I regard it, but is sure of my
sympathy--because it's yours," he answered.

As though she had not heard, she went on.

"I was an orphan. I never knew my father and mother. The first things I
remember are of the country--perhaps that is why I love the
out-of-doors--the sky through my window, filled with huge, puffy,
ice-cream clouds, a little new-born pig that somebody put in my bed one
morning--daisy-fields like snow--and the darling peep-peep-peep of
little bunches of yellow down that I was always trying to catch and
never succeeding. I couldn't say _chicken_. I always said _shicken_"
She paused. With that tenderness which every woman entertains for her
own little girlhood, she smiled.

"I've told you of the five white birches. I was looking at them and
naming them on my fingers the day that Aunt Paula came. My childhood
ended there. I seemed to grow up all at once."

Blake muttered something inarticulate. But at her look of inquiry, he
merely said. "Go on!"

"She isn't really my aunt by blood,--Aunt Paula isn't. You
understand--my father and her husband were brothers. They all
died--everybody died but just Aunt Paula and me. So she took me away
with her. And after that it wa