the footman, when she had
rubbed the ring and he had reappeared, and she had reproached him. 'I've
been in service long enough to do exactly what I am told. My life-sorrow
has been----'

'I say,' Fina said suddenly, 'can't you get the pagoda back for me?'

Instantly the pagoda was there and the footman was not. Fina spent the
afternoon playing with the beautiful ivory toy, but when it was tea-time
she had to ask the genie footman to take it away again, for she dared
not face the questions and she could not invent the explanations that
would have followed if she had turned up at the house with the pagoda
under her arm.

You will think that Fina ought to have been the happiest of little
girls, now that she had a genie footman Slave of the Ring in a green
coat to get her anything she wanted, and run her errands on his
beautiful balustrade-like white silk legs. But this was not so.

It was all very well to go into the wood every day and make the footman
fetch her the most beautiful dolls and toys and sweets, but even sweets
are dull if you eat them alone; and what is the use of toys, or even
pagodas, if you have no one to show them to, and dare not have them
except in a secret corner of the wood?

She tried to get the footman to play with her, but he said that was a
little more than anyone could expect, and began again about his sorrows;
and as for getting him to take any interest in the wonderful things he
fetched for her, she felt at once that these were nothing to a genie
footman with such a jewelled and exciting past as his.

She was not a very clever little girl. She wished for a white pony, and,
of course, it came, but there was no room for it in the wood, and it
walked on her foot and tried to bite her, and she hastily had to send it
away. She wished for a pet lamb, but it baaed so loudly that she was
almost discovered by the farmer, so that had to go too. And she had
been wishing for these vain and unsatisfying things for more than a week
before she thought of asking for a little girl to play with.

The genie brought a little girl at once, but she was a horrid little
girl, with a red pigtail and a green frock trimmed with black bead
trimming, and she broke the toys and laughed at Fina when she tried to
tell her the story of the pagoda and the Ring Slave. Also there was no
room to play in the secret nook in the wood, and when the little girl
had slapped Fina and taken the pagoda away from her it seemed best t