grateful and a little beast;
but--is it true?"

"Why should I mislead you in the matter, Flamby?"

"I don't know; but--if you knew how I've longed and longed to be able to
go to London, among people who understand; to get away from these men
and women who are really half vegetables!"

Paul laughed gaily. "But you love the country?"

"I could not live long away from it. But the people! And I love the
birds and the animals, and--oh!"--her voice rose excitedly--"don't kill
it!"

A wasp was humming dangerously about Paul's head, and although his love
of all things that had life was as strong as Flamby's, the
self-protective instinct had led him to endeavour to knock the wasp
away. Now, Flamby extending one motionless hand, the gaudily-striped
insect alighted upon her finger and began busily to march from thence to
the rosy tip of the next, and so on until it reached Flamby's little
curved thumb. Holding the thumb upright, so that the wasp stood upon a
miniature tower, she pursed her lips entrancingly and blew the insect
upon its way as gently as if borne upon a summer zephyr.

"They only sting if you hurt them," she explained; "and so would you!"

"But," said Paul, who had watched the incident wonderingly, "if all
insects were permitted to live unmolested, and all animals for that
matter, the world would become uninhabitable for man."

"I know," replied Flamby pensively--"and I cannot understand why nature
is so cruel."

Paul studied the piquant, sun-kissed face with a new interest. "Flamby,"
he said earnestly, "one day you will be a great artist."

She looked into his eyes, but only for a moment, turned and fled. There
were a hundred things he had wanted to say to her, a hundred questions
he had wanted to ask. But off she ran along the margin of the wood, and
where a giant elm stood, a forest outpost at a salient, paused and waved
her hand to him.

VII

For all the exquisite sympathy of his nature and intuitive understanding
of others, there was a certain trait in the character of Paul Mario not
infrequently found in men of genius. From vanity he was delightfully
free, nor had adulation spoiled him; but his interest in the world was
strangely abstract, and his outlook almost cosmic. He dreamed of
building a ladder of stars for all earth-bound humanity, and thought not
in units, but in multitudes. Picturesque distress excited his emotions
keenly, and sometimes formed ineffaceable memories, but memories oddl