id,
exactly how her mother looked--her delicate, girlish face, the big clear
eyes, the wavy hair all loose on the pillow. They had just placed the
child in her arms, and she was drawing the small bundle close up to her,
and looking down at it, and crying. It was the crying that Anthy
remembered the best of all.

And the child that Anthy saw so clearly was Anthy herself--and this was
the only memory she ever had of her mother. That poor lady, perhaps a
little tired of a world too big and harsh for her, and disappointed that
her child was not a son whom she could name Anthony, after its father,
tarried only a week after Anthy was born.

"You see," said Anthy, "I was intended to be a boy."

[Illustration: A very lonely little girl, sitting at a certain place on
the third step from the bottom of the stairs]

After that, Anthy remembered a little girl, a very lonely little girl,
sitting at a certain place on the third step from the bottom of the
stairs. There were curious urns filled with flowers on the wall paper,
and her two friends, Richard and Rachel, came out of the wall near the
dining-room door and looked through the stair spindles at her. Rachel
had lovely curly hair and Richard wore shiny brass buttons on his
jacket, and made faces. She used to whisper to them between the
spindles, and whenever any one came they went back quickly through the
wall. She liked Rachel better than Richard.

There was a time later when her hero was Ivanhoe--just the name, not the
man in the book. She read a great deal there in the lonely house, and
her taste in those years ran to the gloomy and mysterious. The early
chapters of an old book called "Wuthering Heights" thrilled her with
fascinated interest, and she delighted in "Peter Ibbetson." Sometimes
she would take down the volume of Tennyson in her father's library and,
if the light was low, read aloud:

I _hate_ the _dreadful_ hollow behind the little wood.

As she read, she would thrill with delicious horror.

[Illustration: The home of her girlhood seemed dreadfully shabby, small,
and old-fashioned]

Then she went away to school, not knowing in the least how much her
father missed her; and when she came back, the home of her girlhood
seemed dreadfully shabby, small, old-fashioned, and she did not like the
iron deer on the lawn nor the cabinet of specimens in the corner of the
parlour.

Anthy did not tell me all these things at one time, and some she never
told me at a