iling, and that was the
metamorphosis of Rue Carew.

Where was the thin girl he remembered--with her untidy chestnut hair
and freckles, and a rather sweet mouth--dressed in garments the only
mission of which was to cover a flat chest and frail body and limbs
whose too rapid growth had outstripped maturity?

To search for her he went back to the beginning, where a little girl
in a pink print dress, bare-legged and hatless, loitered along an
ancient rail fence and looked up shyly at him as he warned her to keep
out of range of the fusillade from the bushes across the pasture.

He thought of her again at the noisy party in Gayfield on that white
night in winter; visualised the tall, shy, overgrown girl who danced
with him and made no complaint when her slim foot was trodden on. And
again he remembered the sleigh and the sleighbells clashing and
tinkling under the moon; the light from her doorway, and how she stood
looking back at him; and how, on the mischievous impulse of the
moment, he had gone back and kissed her----

At the memory an odd sensation came over him, scaring him a little.
How on earth had he ever had the temerity to do such a thing to her!

And, as he thought of this exquisite, slender, clear-eyed young girl
who had greeted him at the Paris terminal--this charming embodiment of
all that is fresh and sweet and fearless--in her perfect hat and gown
of _mondaine_ youth and fashion, the memory of his temerity appalled
him.

Imagine his taking an unencouraged liberty now!

Nor could he dare imagine encouragement from the Rue Carew so
amazingly revealed to him.

Out of what, in heaven's name, had this lovely girl developed? Out of
a shy, ragged, bare-legged child, haunting the wild blackberry tangles
in Brookhollow?

Out of the frail, charmingly awkward, pathetic, freckled mill-hand in
her home-made party clothes, the rather sweet expression of whose
mouth once led him to impudent indiscretion?

Out of what had she been evolved--this young girl whom he had left
just now standing beside her boudoir door with the Princess Naia's arm
around her waist? Out of the frightened, white-lipped, shabby girl who
had come dragging her trembling limbs and her suitcase up the dark
stairway outside his studio? Out of the young thing with sagging hair,
crouched in an armchair beside his desk, where her cheap hat lay with
two cheap hatpins sticking in the crown? Out of the fragile figure
buried in the bedclothes of a