er the affair of the boat, when he spent a good
deal of time haunting the sacred precincts of the house where Helen
lived. The precincts consisted of a dusty lane, a flat, ugly fenced
field where a cow and a horse grazed, and a place immediately about the
house covered with thick grass and shaded by maple trees. There were
some shrubs too, behind which one could hide if necessary, but they were
prickly, uncomfortable to nestle against, and the unmown grass absorbed
an immense quantity of dew. In imagination, however, the Baby wandered
on pastoral slopes and in classic shades. At first he paid his visits at
night when the family were asleep, and he slipped about so quietly that
no one but the horse and the cow need know where he went or what he did.
At length, however, he grew more bold, and took his way across the maple
grove going and coming from other evening errands. Trespassing is not
much of a fault at the lake of St. Jean. The Baby became expert in
dodging hastily by, with his eyes upon the windows; the dream of his
life was to see the gymnastics performed again; at length it was
realised.

The thing we desire most is often the thing that brings us woe.

The Baby caught sight of Helen practising her beautiful attitudes. He
hung on to a rail of the verandah, and gazed and gazed. Then he took his
life in his hand, as it were, and swung himself up on the verandah; he
moved like a cat, for he supposed that the stalwart Johns was within.
From this better point of view, peeping about, he now surveyed the whole
interior of the small drawing-room. What was his joy to find that there
was no family circle of spectators; Helen was exercising herself alone!
He hugged to himself the idea that the gracious little spectacle was all
his own.

Now, as it happened, the Baby in his secret hauntings of this house had
not been so entirely unseen as he supposed. Certainly Johns had never
caught sight of him or he would have been made aware of it, but Helen,
since the night of the boating mystery, had more than once caught sight
of a white figure passing among the maple shadows. These glimpses had
added point and colour to all the mystical fancies that clustered round
the helmsman of the yacht. She hardly believed that some guardian spirit
was protecting her in visible semblance, or that some human Prince
Charming, more kingly and wise than any man that she had yet seen, had
chosen this peculiar mode of courting her; but her wish was