she hoped I would have a happy day.
And my father looked at me as he went away with a sort of wistful anxiety
that made me again have that horrible feeling of not deserving his care
and affection. And oh, how I wished the long day alone with my
grandmother were over! I could not bear being in the drawing-room, I
was afraid of seeming to glance in the direction of the china cupboard;
I felt miserable whenever my grandmother spoke kindly to me.

"And how kind she was that day! If ever a little girl _should_ have been
happy, that little girl was I. Grandmother let me look over the drawers
where she kept her beautiful scraps of silk and velvet, ever so many of
which she gave me--lovely pieces to make a costume such as I had fancied
for Lady Rosabelle, but which I had never had the heart to see about.
She let me 'tidy' her best work-box--a _wonderful_ box, full of every
conceivable treasure and curiosity--and then, when I was a little tired
with all my exertions, she made me sit down on a footstool at her feet
and talked to me so nicely--all about when _she_ was a little girl--fancy
that, Molly, your great-great-grandmother ever having been a little
girl!--and about the queer legends and fairy tales that in those days
were firmly believed in in the far-away Scotch country place where her
childhood was spent. For the first time for all these unhappy ten days,
I began to feel like myself again. Sitting there at my grandmother's feet
listening to her I actually forgot my troubles, though I was in the very
drawing-room I had learnt so to dread, within a few yards of the cupboard
I dared not even glance at.

"There came a little pause in the conversation; I leaned my head against
my grandmother's knee.

"'I wish there were fairies now,' I said. 'Don't you, grandmother?'

"Grandmother said 'no, on the whole she preferred things being as they
were.' There were _some_ fairies certainly she would be sorry to lose,
Princess Sweet-temper, and Lady Make-the-best-of-it, and old Madame Tidy,
and, most of all perhaps, the beautiful fairy _Candour_. I laughed at her
funny way of saying things, but yet something in her last words made the
uneasy feeling come back again. Then my grandmother went on talking in a
different tone.

"'Do you know, Nelly,' she said, 'queer things happen sometimes that one
would be half inclined to put down to fairies if one did not know
better?'

"I pricked up my ears.

"'Do tell me what sort of things, gr