* * *

It was late that night when Marie-Louise came into Anne's room. "Are you
asleep?" she asked, with the door at a crack.

"No."

"Will you mind--if I talk?"

"No."

Anne was in front of her open fire, writing to Uncle Rod. The fire was
another of the luxuries in which she revelled. It was such a wonder of a
fireplace, with its twinkling brasses, and its purring logs. She
remembered the little round stove in her room at Bower's.

Marie-Louise had come to talk of Geoffrey Fox.

"I adore his eye-glasses."

"Oh, Marie-Louise--his poor eyes."

"He isn't poor," the child said, passionately, "not even his eyes. Milton
was blind--and--and there was his poetry."

"Dr. Dicky hopes his eyes are getting better."

"He says they are. That he sees things now through a sort of silver rain.
He has to have some one write for him. His little sister Mimi has been
doing it, but she is going to be married."

"Mimi?"

"Yes. He found out that she had a lover, and so he has insisted. And then
he will be left alone."

She sat gazing into the fire, a small humped-up figure in a gorgeous
dressing-gown. At last she said, "Why didn't you love him?"

"There was some one else, Marie-Louise."

Marie-Louise drew close and laid her red head on Anne's knee. "Some one
that you are going to marry?"

Anne shook her head. "Some one whom I shall never marry. He
loves--another girl, Marie-Louise."

"Oh!" There was a long silence, as the two of them gazed into the fire.
Then Marie-Louise reached up a thin little hand to Anne's warm clasp.
"That's always the way, isn't it? It is a sort of game, with Love always
flitting away to--another girl."

CHAPTER XXI

_In Which St. Michael Hears a Call._

IT was in April that Geoffrey Fox wrote to Anne.

"When I told you that I was coming back to Bower's, I said that I wanted
quiet to think out my new book, but I did not tell you that I fancied I
might find your ghost flitting through the halls, or on the road to the
schoolhouse. I felt that there might linger in the long front room the
glowing spirit of the little girl who sat by the fire and talked to me of
my soldiers and their souls.

"And what I thought has come true. You are everywhere, Mistress Anne, not
as I last saw you at Rose Acres in silken attire, but fluttering before
me in your frock of many flounces, carrying your star of a lantern
through the twilight on your way to Diogenes, scolding me on the
sta