of him, and presently realized without surprise that
the Princess was speaking to him.

He felt her first, warm and friendlily, and then he heard her laughing.
He knew she was the Princess though she had no form or likeness.

"But which are you?" he whispered to the laughter.

"The right one."

"The one who stayed or the one who ran away?"

"Oh, if you don't know by this time! I have come to take you to the
House."

"Are you the one who was always there?"

"The Lovely Lady; there was never any other."

"And shall I go there as I used?" asked Peter, "and be happy there?"

"You are free to go; do you not feel it?"

"Oh, here--I feel many things. I am just beginning to understand how I
came to lose the way to it."

"Are you so sure?"

"Quite." Peter's new-found certainty was strong in him. "I made the
mistake of thinking that the House was the House of Love, and it is
really the House of Beauty. I thought if I found the one to love, I
should live in it forever. But now that I have found the way back to it
I see that was a mistake."

"How did you find it?"

"Well, there is a girl here----"

"Ah!" said the Princess.

"She is young," Peter explained; "she looks at things the way I used to,
and that somehow brought me around to the starting-point again."

"I see," said the Princess; the look she turned on him was full of a
strange, secret intelligence which as he returned it without knowing
what it was about, afforded Peter the greatest satisfaction. "Do you
know me now," she said at last, "which one I am?"

"The right one, I am sure of that."

"But which?"

"I know now," Peter answered, "but I am certain that in the morning I
shall not be able to remember."

It was true as Peter had said that the next morning he was in as much
doubt as ever about the princesses. He thought he would go and have a
look at them but forgot what he had come for once he had entered the
spacious quiet of the Academy. Warmed still from his contact of the
night before he found the pictures sentient and friendly. He found
trails in them that led he knew now where, and painted waters that
lapped the fore-shore of remembrance.

After an hour in which he had seen the meaning of the pictures emerge
from the frontier of mysticism which he knew now for the reflection of
his own unstable state, and proceed toward him by way of his
intelligence, he heard the Princess say at his shoulder, at least he
thought it might have been the