had belonged to her late aunt. Tony's soft, slender fingers
went to the necklace, and ignoring her question, he asked: "Why have you
got these funny things round your neck, Auntie Tims?"

"They're not funny. They're beautiful--copies of money which the old
Greeks used to use. A gentleman gave it to me." Tims spoke with a grand
carelessness. "I dare say if you're a good boy he'll tell you stories
about them himself some day. But I want you to explain what it was you
meant to say about dead people. Dead people don't come back, you know."

Tony touched her hand, which lay open on her knee, and played with the
fingers a minute. Then raising his eyes he said, plaintively:

"I do so want my tea."

Once more he had wiped the conversational slate, and the baffled Tims
dismissed him. He opened the door a little and slipped out; put his dark
head in again with an engaging smile, said politely, "I sha'n't be away
_very_ long," and closed the door softly behind him. For that soft
closing of the door was one of the things poor Milly had taught him
which the little 'peoples' did contrive to remember.

The sleeper now began to stir slightly in her sleep, and before Tony's
somewhat prolonged tea was over, she sat up and looked about her.

"Is that Tims?" she asked, in a colorless voice.

"Yes--is it you, Milly?"

"No. What makes you think so?"

"Milly's been trying to come back. I suppose she couldn't manage it."

"Ah!"--there was a deep satisfaction in Mildred's tone now; "I thought
she couldn't!"

CHAPTER XXVII

George Goring and Mildred Stewart did not move in the same social set,
but their sets had points of contact, and it was at these that Goring
was now most likely to be found; especially at the pleasant bachelor
house on Campden Hill. Mrs. Stewart walked in the Park every morning at
an unfashionable hour, and sometimes, yet not too often for discretion,
Goring happened to be walking there too. All told, their meetings were
not very numerous, nor very private. But every half-hour they spent in
each other's company seemed to do the work of a month of intimacy.

July hastened to an end, but an autumn Session brought Goring up to town
in November, and three months of absence found him and Mildred still at
the same point. Sir Cyril Meres was already beginning to plan his
wonderful _tableaux-vivants_, which, however, did not come off until
February. The extraordinary imitative talent which his artistic career