onsideration.

"I never thought of all those contingencies," she laughed. There was the
faintest suspicion of a quiver in her voice. "Let's talk about the
moonlight. But it was the moonlight began it all."

* * * * *

Two hours later the garden lay deserted in the same moonlight.

A woman was sitting by an open window, looking out into the garden. She
had been sitting there quite a long time. Suddenly her eyes filled with
tears.

"Oh, Trix, Trix," she said half aloud, "if only it would work. But it
won't. And it was the moonlight that began it all."

CHAPTER XXI

ON THE MOORLAND

Trix was walking over the moorland. The Duchessa and Miss Tibbutt had
departed to what promised to be an exceedingly dull garden party some
five miles distant. It had been decreed that it was entirely unnecessary
to inflict the same probable dulness on Trix, therefore she had been left
to freedom and her own devices for the afternoon.

Trix was playing the game of "I remember." It can be a quite
extraordinarily fascinating game, or an exceedingly painful one. Trix was
finding it extraordinarily fascinating. It was so gorgeously delightful
to find that nothing had shrunk, nothing lessened in beauty or mystery. A
larch copse was every bit as much a haunt of the Little People as
formerly; the moss every bit as much a cool green carpet for their
tripping feet. A few belated foxglove stems added to the old-time
enchantment of the place. Even a little stream rippling through the wood,
was a veritable stream, and not merely a watery ditch, as it might quite
well have proved. Then there was the view from the gate, through a frame
of beech trees out towards the sea. It was still as entrancing an ocean,
sun-flecked and radiant. There were still as infinite possibilities in
the unknown Beyond, could one have chartered a white-winged boat, and
have sailed to where land and water meet. There was a pond, too,
surrounded by blackberry bushes and great spear-like rushes, perhaps not
quite the enormous lake of one's childhood, but a reasonably large pond
enough, and there were still the blackberry bushes and the spear-like
rushes. And, finally, there was the moorland, glowing with more radiant
crimson lakes and madders than the most wonderful paint box ever held,
and stretching up and down, and up again, till it melted in far away
purples and lavenders.

Trix's heart sang in accord with the laughing