alked together," he
said, "you told me that when something very marvellous had happened to
you and you couldn't believe you were awake, that it was really true,
you asked your Godmother to pinch you. It--er, wouldn't be at all
proper for me to ask you to please pinch me. But if you know any
perfectly proper equivalent, I wish you'd do it."

"I've pinched myself," she returned, "and it seems I am awake. So I
judge you must be, too."

"Then how, please----?"

And she told him.

"And you don't know yet who I am?"

"No."

So he told her. "I warned you it was nothing interesting," he said;
"it is just my work that people are interested in. I don't belong in
there," indicating the great house, "any more than you do. They like
me for a novelty, because I've dared and suffered; and because, as
things turned out, I was in a position to do what they are pleased to
call a great service to the Empire. I wish I liked them better--they
want to be very kind to me, and I was born of them, so they like me the
better for that. But I've been in the wilderness too much--I can't get
used to these strange folk at home."

"I used to think I couldn't get used to strange folk," Mary Alice
murmured, "but I seem to have got on fairly well for a girl from
Nowhere."

"Was it the Secret?"

She nodded.

"When may I know?"

"I--I can't tell."

"You told the King."

"He seemed to need it so."

"Don't I need it?"

"I--I can't tell."

He seemed discouraged, and as if he did not know what next to say.
They strolled in silence over to where she had been standing the night
before when the King spoke to her. From within the great house came
the entrancingly sweet song of a world-famous soprano engaged to pour
her liquid notes before the King.

Mary Alice stood very still, drinking it in. When it ceased, she stole
a look up at the bronzed face beside her; the light from a window in
her far wing of the house fell full on that rugged face, and it looked
very stern but also very sad. Mary Alice's heart, which had been
exultant only a short while ago, began suddenly--in one of those
strange revulsions which all hearts know--to ache indefinably. This
hour would probably be like those other brief hours in which he had
shared her life. To-morrow, or next day, he would be gone; and forever
and forever the memory of these moments on the terrace, with the stars
overhead and that exquisite song in their ears, would be coming back