kney remembered it when, as a child, she had come
here to tea with the Mascarene children, so good that the dye of the
gorgeous Paradise birds had scarcely faded.

A beam of morning sun struck across the room, a great solid, golden bar of
light. Phyl, as she stood for a moment on the threshold, saw motes dancing
in the bar of light; the air was close and almost stuffy owing to the
windows being shut. A rocking-horse, much, much the worse for wear stood
in one corner, he was piebald and the beam of light just failed to touch
his brush-like tail. A Noah's Ark of the good old pattern stood on the lid
of a great chest under one of the windows, and in the centre of the room a
heavy table of plain oak nicked by knives and stained with ink told its
tale.

There were books in a little hanging book-case, books of the 'forties' and
'fifties': "Peter Parley," "The Child's Pilgrim's Progress," "The
Dairy-Maid's Daughter," an odd volume of _Harper's_ _Magazine_ containing
an instalment of "Little Dorrit," Caroline Chesebro's "Children of Light,"
and Samuel Irenaeus Prime's "Elizabeth Thornton or the Flower and Fruit of
Female Piety, and other Sketches." Miss Pinckney opened one of the windows
to let in air; Phyl, who had said nothing, stood looking about her at the
forsaken toys, the chairs, and the little three-legged stool most
evidently once the property of some child.

All nurseries have a generic likeness. It seemed to her that she knew this
room, from the beam of light with the motes dancing in it to the
bird-patterned paper. Kilgobbin nursery was papered with a paper giving an
endless repetition of one subject--a man driving a pig to market--with
that exception, the two rooms were not unlike. Yet those birds were the
haunting charm of this place, the things that most appealed to her, things
that seemed the ghosts of old friends.

She came to the window and looked out through the bars. Across the garden
of Vernons one caught a glimpse of other gardens, palmetto-tree tops, and
away, beyond the battery, a hint of the blue harbour. Just the picture to
fill an imaginative child's mind with all sorts of pleasant fancies about
the world, and Phyl, forgetting for a moment Miss Pinckney, herself, and
the room in which she was, stood looking out, caught in a momentary day
dream, just like a child in one of those reveries that are part of the
fairy tale of childhood.

That touch of blue sea beyond the red roofs and green palmetto fr