ions of excessive gratitude. All the
time his mind was questioning amazedly.

By the time the speeches which he deemed necessary were finished, he had
followed the girl into a spacious room, furnished in the large gay style
of the fifties, brilliantly lit, as if for a festival, and warmed by a
log fire of generous dimensions. Having led him in, listening silently
the while, and put her additional lamp upon the table, she now spoke,
with no _empressement_, almost with a manner of _insouciance_.

'You are perfectly welcome; my father would never have wished his house
to be inhospitable.'

With her words his own apologies seemed to lose their significance; he
felt a little foolish, and she, with some slight evidence of childish
awkwardness, seemed to seek a pretext for short escape.

'I will tell my sister.' These words came with more abruptness, as if
the interior excitement was working itself to the surface.

The room was a long one. She went out by a door at the farther end, and,
as with intense curiosity he watched her quickly receding form, he
noticed that when she thought herself out of his sight she entered the
other room with a skip. At that same end of the room hung a full-length
portrait of a gentleman. It was natural that Courthope should walk
towards it, trying to become acquainted with some link in the train of
circumstances which had raised this enchanted palace in the wilderness;
he had not followed to hear, but he overheard.

'Eliz, it's a _real_ young man!'

'No! you are only making up, and' (here a touch of querulousness) 'I've
often told you that I don't like make-ups that one wants too much to be
true. I'll only have the Austens and Sir Charles and Evelina and----'

'Eliz! He's _not_ a make-up; the fairies have sent him to our party.
Isn't it just fairilly entrancing? He has a curly moustache and a nice
nose. He's English, like father. He says "cawn't," and "shawn't," and
"heah," and "theyah,"--genuine, no affectation. Oh' (here came a little
gurgle of joy), 'and to-night, too! It's the first _perfectly_ joyful
thing that has _ever_ come to us.'

Courthope moved quietly back and stood before the blazing logs, looking
down into them with a smile of pure pleasure upon his lips.

It was not long before the door, which she had left ajar, was re-opened,
and a light-wheeled chair was pushed into the room. It contained a
slight, elfin-like girl, white-faced, flaxen-haired, sharp-featured, and
arraye