to dream.'"

"I don't want to dream. They might be horrid dreams--"

And then Jeanette came down, and poured their coffee, and asked about
the news in the morning paper.

Dressed for her trip to the circus, Anne looked like a girl in her
teens--white skirt and short green coat--stout sports shoes and white
hat. She wore her silver beads, and Christopher said, "I'm not sure that
I would if I were you."

"Why not?"

"In such a crowd."

But she kept them on.

They motored to the circus grounds, and came in out of the white glare
to the cool dimness of the tent as if they had dived from the sun-bright
surface of the sea. But there the resemblance ceased. Here was no
silence, but blatant noise--roar and chatter and shriek, the beat of the
tom-tom, the thin piping of a flute--the crash of a band. But it was the
thin piping which Christopher followed, guiding Anne with his hand on
her arm.

Following the plaintive note, they came at last to the snake-charmer--an
old man in a white turban. The snakes were in a covered basket. He sat
with his feet under him and piped.

Christopher spoke to him in a strange tongue. The piping broke off
abruptly and the man answered with eagerness. There was a quick
interchange of phrases.

"I know his village," Christopher said; "he is going to show you his
snakes."

A crowd gathered, but the snake-charmer saw only the big man who had
spoken to his homesick heart, and the girl with the silver beads. He
knew another girl who had had a string of beads like that--and they had
brought her luck--a dark-skinned girl, his daughter. Her husband had
bestowed the beads on her marriage night, and her first child had been a
son.

He put the thin reed to his lips, and blew upon it. The snakes lifted
their heads. He drew them up and out of the basket, and put them through
their fantastic paces. Then he laid aside his pipe, shut them in their
basket, and spoke to Christopher.

"He says that no evil can teach you while you wear the beads,"
Christopher told Anne.

The old man, with his eyes on her intent face, spoke again. "What you
think is evil--cannot be evil," Christopher interpreted. "The gods know
best."

They moved toward the inner tent.

"Are you tired?" Christopher asked. "We don't have to stay."

"I want to stay," and so they went in, and presently with a blare of
trumpets the great parade began. They looked down on men and women in
Roman chariots, men on horseback, women on ho