would prove to be your home were not borne
out?" asked Ruth, after a bit.

"No, but even yet I feel sure that I have lived at least part of my life
in Boston, or near there. One doesn't have even shadowy memories of big
monuments and historic places without some basis; and it was not the
memory of having seen pictures of them. It was a real vision."

"And the name Estelle Brown?"

"Oh, I'm sure that belongs to me. It seems a very part of myself."

"Did you tell any of this to Mr. Pertell or to the other moving picture
managers?" asked Alice.

"No. You are the first persons to whom I have told my secret," Estelle
said. "I was afraid if I mentioned it they might make it public for
advertising purposes, you know. They might make public the fact that a
young actress was looking for herself and her parents. I never could
bear that!"

"But you want to find your folks, don't you?" asked Alice.

"That's the queer part of it," Estelle replied. "I seem never to have
had any relatives. The way I feel about it now, I would never know that
I had had a father or a mother. I seem to have just 'growed,' the way
poor Topsy did in Uncle Tom's Cabin. That is another strange part of my
present existence. I seem to be in a world by myself, and, as far as I
can tell, I have always been there."

"What about Lieutenant Varley?" inquired Alice.

"Lieutenant Varley?" and Estelle's voice showed that she was puzzled.

"The young officer who said he met you in Portland."

"Oh, yes. I had forgotten. Well, I have absolutely no recollection of
that, and I'm sure I would remember if I had been in the West. I'm
certain I never was there."

"And yet if you weren't in the West how did you learn to ride so well?"
Ruth queried.

"That's another part of the puzzle, my dear. Riding seems to come as
natural to me as breathing. I don't seem ever to have learned it any
more than I learned how to dance. I seem always to have known how."

"There's only one way to account for that," Alice said.

"How?"

"From the fact that you must have started to learn to ride and to dance
when you were very young--a mere child."

"I suppose that would account for it. And yet, I can't remember ever
being a child. I don't recall having played with dolls or having made
mud pies. For me my existence begins about three or four years back, and
goes on from there, mostly in moving pictures."

"It is a queer case," commented Ruth. "I don't know what to do to help