ked. Then on a fine spring
morning he paid a visit to the old woman who sold penny packets of
seeds, and bought nasturtiums, mignonette, Virginia stocks and
candytuft, twelve pansy roots and twelve daisy roots. Michael's flowers
grew and flourished and he loved his window-boxes. He liked to turn
towards his window at night now. Somehow those flowers were a
protection. He liked to lie in bed during the sparrow-thronged mornings
of spring and fancy how the birds must enjoy hopping about in his
window-boxes. He was always careful to scatter plenty of crumbs, so that
they should not be tempted to peck up his seeds or pull to pieces the
pansy buds. He was disappointed that neither the daisies nor the pansies
smelt sweet, and when the mignonette bloomed, he almost sniffed it away,
so lovely was the perfume of it during the blue days of June. He had a
set of gardening tools, so small and suitable to the size of his garden
that rake and hoe and spade and fork were all originally fastened to one
small square of cardboard.

But, best of all, when the pansies were still a-blowing and the Virginia
stocks were fragrant, and when from his mother's window below he could
see his nasturtium flowers, golden and red and even tortoiseshell
against the light, his mother came home suddenly for a surprize, and the
house woke up.

"But you're not looking well, darling," she said.

"Oh, yes, quite well. Quite well," muttered Nurse, "Quite well. Mustn't
be a molly-coddle. No. No."

"I really must see about a nice governess for you," said Mrs. Fane.
Nurse sniffed ominously.

Chapter V: _The First Fairy Princess_

Miss Carthew's arrival widened very considerably Michael's view of life.
Nurse's crabbed face and stunted figure had hitherto appropriately
enough dominated such realities of existence as escaped from the glooms
and shadows of his solitary childhood. Michael had for so long been
familiar with ugliness that he was dangerously near to an eternal
imprisonment in a maze of black fancies. He had come to take pleasure in
the grotesque and the macabre, and even on the sunniest morning his
imagination would turn to twilight and foggy eves, to basements and
empty houses and loneliness and dust. Michael would read furtively the
forbidden newspapers that Nurse occasionally left lying about. In these
he would search for murders and crimes, and from their association with
thrills of horror, the newspapers themselves had gradually acqui