e. Why had the girls, when Nicholas was young, been so entirely
different! A sudden bitterness seized Nicholas: it was as though he had
just learnt that long ago, without knowing it, he had been robbed.

The child must be cold. Nicholas fetched his fur-lined cloak and wrapped
it about her.

There was something else he ought to do. The idea came to him while
drawing the cloak around her shoulders, very gently, not to disturb
her--something he wanted to do, if only he could think what it was. The
girl's lips were parted. She appeared to be speaking to him, asking him
to do this thing--or telling him not to do it. Nicholas could not be
sure which. Half a dozen times he turned away, and half a dozen times
stole back to where she sat sleeping with that delightfully impertinent
expression on her face, her lips parted. But what she wanted, or what it
was he wanted, Nicholas could not think.

Perhaps Christina would know. Perhaps Christina would know who she was
and how she got there. Nicholas climbed the stairs, swearing at them for
creaking.

Christina's door was open. No one was in the room; the bed had not been
slept upon. Nicholas descended the creaking stairs.

The girl was still asleep. Could it be Christina herself? Nicholas
examined the delicious features one by one. Never before, so far as he
could recollect, had he seen the girl; yet around her neck--Nicholas had
not noticed it before--lay Christina's locket, rising and falling as she
breathed. Nicholas knew it well; the one thing belonging to her mother
Christina had insisted on keeping. The one thing about which she had
ever defied him. She would never have parted with that locket. It must
be Christina herself. But what had happened to her? Or to himself.
Remembrance rushed in upon him. The odd pedlar! The scene with Jan! But
surely all that had been a dream? Yet there upon the littered desk still
stood the pedlar's silver flask, together with the twin stained glasses.

Nicholas tried to think, but his brain was in a whirl. A ray of sunshine
streaming through the window fell across the dusty room. Nicholas had
never seen the sun, that he could recollect. Involuntarily he stretched
his hands towards it, felt a pang of grief when it vanished, leaving
only the grey light. He drew the rusty bolts, flung open the great door.
A strange world lay before him, a new world of lights and shadows, that
wooed him with their beauty--a world of low, soft voices that called t