ntess cut slices of hard, brown bread, and I added butter in little
hillocks.

Then we ate and drank; and never was a meal so good. We seemed to have
known each ether a long time, and already we had common jokes connected
with our past--that past which had been the present this morning. It was
after one o'clock when it occurred lo us that it was bedtime; and as at
last the three ladies flitted away down the dim corridor, Terry and I,
watching them, saw that something flitted after.

It was the little black dog of Airole.

PART II

TOLD BY BEECHY KIDDER

VII

A CHAPTER OF CHILDISHNESS

When I waked up that morning in the old monastery at San Dalmazzo, if
that's the way to call it, and especially to spell it, I really thought
for a few minutes that I must be dreaming. "There's no good getting up,"
I thought, "for if I do I shall somnambulize, and maybe break my rather
pleasing nose." Once, when I was a little girl, I fell down-stairs when I
was asleep, and made one of my front teeth come out. It was a front
tooth, and Mamma had promised me five dollars if I'd have it pulled; so
that was money in my pocket. But I haven't got any teeth to sell for
five dollars now, and it's well to be careful. Accordingly I just lay
still in that funny little iron bed, saying, "Beechy Kidder, is this
_you_?"

Perhaps it was because of all those bewildering impressions the day
before, or perhaps it was from having been so dead asleep that I felt
exactly as if I were no relation to myself. Anyhow, that was the way I
_did_ feel, and I began to be awfully afraid I should wake up back in
Denver months ago, before anything had happened, or seemed likely ever
to happen.

When I thought of Mamma and myself, as we used to be, I grew almost sure
that the things hadn't happened, because they didn't seem the kind of
things that could possibly happen to us.

Why, I didn't even need to shut my eyes to see our Denver house, for it
was so much more real than any other house I'd been in, or dreamed I'd
been in since, and especially more real than that tiny, whitewashed
room at the monastery with a green curtain of vines hanging over the
window.

A square, stone house, with a piazza in front (only people out of
America are so stupid, they don't know what I mean when I say "piazza");
about six feet of yard with some grass and flowers. Me at school; Mamma
reading novels with one eye, and darning papa's stockings with the
other. My