gain on the platform, while
Shirley made the youngster wave his hand. David managed an answering
smile.

He walked homeward by a long roundabout way. The rest of that day he
spent in working feverishly at unfinished odds and ends of packing.
Then he got out all his sketches and plans and slowly tore them into
bits, until the floor around him was littered with the fragments. Last
of all he came to the St. Christopher's plans. But his hands refused
his command to destroy. He sat looking at this evidence of his
failure, until darkness fell and hid them from his sight. He rose then
and, wrapping them up carefully, put them with the boxes for storage.

There was nothing more that he could do. He had not eaten since
morning but he was not hungry. He leaned back in a chair and let all
the thoughts and feelings he had held at bay during the busy days rush
at him in the darkness. An incredible loneliness was upon him, a sense
of loss bitterer even than loneliness. It seemed that something for
which he had paid dearly had been stolen from him.

CHAPTER V

GOOD FAIRIES

But what of the fairies?

So far the old witch had had it all her own way, and that she had done
very badly, if not quite her worst, you will have to admit. She had
David by day in a cubby-hole office adjoining a noisy throbbing shop,
making drawings of mechanical devices out of Radbourne's or an
irritable foreman's brain; by his easel in the lonesome apartment at
night, working out on paper from Dick Holden's notes the ideas of
Dick's clients, who knew exactly what they wanted but not how it would
look; saying sadly but sternly, "Begone!" to ideas of his own (in
ecclesiastic architecture) that might nevermore hope to have a real
birth. She had taken from him what no one could restore, the fine
silky bloom of his youth; and something worth even more, though that
was a loss he was not yet ready to admit. Worst of all, she had him
convinced that he was a failure, a weakling and misfit, a sort of green
fool who had asked for the moon and been properly punished for his
temerity. And that was a skein even fairies would find hard to unravel.

But there was one who was willing to try.

Who ever heard of a fairy with red Dundrearies? Nobody, of course, but
you shall hear of one now. Although the whiskers are really beside the
case; all a good fairy needs is a pair of keen eyes and a heart as big
as a drum.

An odd fish, no doubt of it, was