twilight, lost their colour as the gas
flared up, and evening out of doors darkened into night.

"I've brought you bread and cheese with a slice of cold beef," announced
Miss Hepburn, "and Mrs. Muir has baked you a potato, but I am not sure
whether your grandmother would approve of that. She distinctly said a
cold supper."

"Will you please thank Mrs. Muir for me?" Barrie asked.

"You can thank her to-morrow."

"I mayn't have a chance. Do thank her for me to-night. Say I wanted you
to."

"Why are you in such a hurry?"

"Oh--just _because_. Will you?"

"Yes, I will try, after prayers, when she is shutting up the house. Now,
eat your supper."

"I don't want to, yet. Please, Heppie, dear Heppie, tell me what you
know about my mother. You weren't here when she was, but you're a kind
of cousin of Grandma's, and you must have heard all about her."

"If I had, that would not give me the right to tell you," replied Miss
Hepburn, clinging desperately to her stiff dignity, despite the pleading
voice and the "dear, dear Heppie," against which, being one third human,
she was not quite proof. It was always difficult not to be beguiled by
Barrie.

"I've only you I _can_ come to," said the girl. "You're the one person
in the house except me who isn't old and dried-up."

This was a stroke of genius, but the genius of instinct, for Barrie had
no experience in the art of cajolery. "Was I named after my mother?"

"Only partly. She was a Miss Ballantree, and her first name was Barbara,
I believe; but she disliked it, and when her husband wished to have the
child christened the same, she insisted on Barribel. It seems that is an
old Scottish name also, or Celtic perhaps, for she was Irish, though I
know nothing of her family. But Barribel has always sounded frivolous to
me."

"Yet you would never call me Barrie when I begged you to. I wonder if
there ever was another girl who had to make up her own pet name, and
then had nobody who would use it except herself? When I talk to myself I
always say 'Barrie,' in different tones of voice, to hear how it sounds.
I try to say it as if I loved myself, because no one else loves
me--unless maybe you do; just a tiny, tiny bit. Do you, Heppie?"

"Of course I have an affection for you," Miss Hepburn returned
decorously, half alarmed at so pronounced a betrayal of her inner
emotions, "and naturally your grandmother----"

"Let's not talk about her now," Barrie pleaded. "Was my mother yo