ous. Why, he never spoke
a word of love to me in his life!"

"Humph!--that silent kind's the worst; you don't give him a chance."

"And I don't mean to--does that satisfy you?" she demanded. "If it
doesn't, I'll tell you something--but it's a secret; you won't tell?"

"Not if you don't want me to; I ain't that kind."

"I know you're not, Tave; that's why I'm going to tell you. Here, let me
whisper--"; she bent to his ear; he was seated on a stool in the coach
house mending a strap; "--I've waited all this time for that prince to
come, and do you suppose for one moment I'd look at any one else?"

"Now that ain't fair to fool me like that, Aileen!"

Octavius was really vexed, but he spoke the last words to empty air, for
the girl caught up her skirt and ran like a deer up the lane. He could
hear her laughing at his discomfiture; the sound grew fainter and
fainter; when it ceased he resumed his work, from time to time shaking
his head ominously and talking to himself as a vent for his outraged
feelings.

But Aileen spoke the truth. Her vivid imagination, a factor in the true
Celtic temperament, provided her with another life, apart from the busy
practical one which Mrs. Champney laid out for her. All her childish
delights of day-dreaming and joyous romancing, fostered by that first
novel which Luigi Poggi thrust through the knothole in the orphan asylum
fence, was at once transferred to Alice Van Ostend and her surroundings
so soon as the two children established their across-street
acquaintance. Upon her arrival in Flamsted, the child's adaptability to
changed circumstances and new environment was furthered by the play of
this imagination that fed itself on what others, who lack it, might call
the commonplace of life: the house at Champ-au-Haut became her lordly
palace; the estate a park; she herself a princess guarded only too well
by an aged duenna; Octavius Buzzby and Romanzo Caukins she looked upon
as life-servitors.

Now and then the evidence of this unreal life, which she was leading,
was made apparent to Octavius and Romanzo by some stilted mode of
speech. At such times they humored her; it provided amusement of the
richest sort. She also continued to invent "novels" for Romanzo's
benefit, and many a half-hour the two spent in the carriage
house--Aileen aglow with the enthusiasm of narration, and Romanzo intent
upon listening, charmed both with the tale and the narrator. In these
invented novels, there was