ed," Allerton read on, "and grew wild in a
luxuriant tangle of stem and blossom, reaching the branches of the
willow-tree, and making the whole place dark and dim. At last she
could bear it no longer and she told one of her sisters----"

"I wouldn't tell my sister, if I had one," Letty assured herself. "I'd
never tell no one. It's more like my own secret when I keep it to
myself. Nobody'll ever know--not even him."

"The other sisters learned the story then, but they told it to no one
but a few other mermaids, who told it to their intimate friends. One
of these friends knew who the prince was, and told the princess where
he came from and where his kingdom lay. Now she knew where he lived;
and many a night she spent there, floating on the water. She ventured
nearer to the land than any of her sisters had done. She swam up the
narrow lagoon, under the carved marble balcony; and there she sat and
watched the prince when he thought himself alone in the moonlight. She
remembered how his head had rested on her breast, and how she had
kissed his brow; but he would never know, and could not even dream of
her."

Letty had not kissed her prince's brow, but she had kissed his feet;
but he would never know that, and would dream of her no more than this
other prince of the little thing who loved him.

Allerton continued to read on, partly because the old tale came back
to him with its enchanting loveliness, partly because reading aloud
would be a feature of his educational scheme, and partly because it
soothed him to be doing it. He could never read to Barbara. Once, when
he tried it, the sound of his voice and the monotony of his cadences,
so got on her nerves that she stopped him in the middle of a word.
But this girl with her uncritical mind, and her gratitude for small
bits of kindliness, gave him confidence in himself by her rapt way of
listening.

She did listen raptly, since a prince's reading must always be more
arresting than that of ordinary mortals, and also because, both
consciously and subconsciously, she was taking his pronunciation as a
standard.

* * * * *

And just at this minute her name was under discussion in a brilliant
gathering at The Hindoo Lantern, in another quarter of New York.

If you know The Hindoo Lantern you know how much it depends on
atmosphere. Once a disused warehouse in a section of the city which
commerce had forsaken, the enthusiasm for the da