I never gave him a
word or a look to make him think it!"

At nine o'clock Dulcie took a tin box of crackers and a little pot of
raspberry jam out of her trunk, and had a feast. She offered General
Kitchener some jam on a cracker; but he only looked at her as the sphinx
would have looked at a butterfly--if there are butterflies in the
desert.

"Don't eat it if you don't want to," said Dulcie. "And don't put on so
many airs and scold so with your eyes. I wonder if you'd be so superior
and snippy if you had to live on six dollars a week."

It was not a good sign for Dulcie to be rude to General Kitchener. And
then she turned Benvenuto Cellini face downward with a severe gesture.
But that was not inexcusable; for she had always thought he was Henry
VIII, and she did not approve of him.

At half-past nine Dulcie took a last look at the pictures on the
dresser, turned out the light, and skipped into bed. It's an awful
thing to go to bed with a good-night look at General Kitchener, William
Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. This story
really doesn't get anywhere at all. The rest of it comes later--sometime
when Piggy asks Dulcie again to dine with him, and she is feeling
lonelier than usual, and General Kitchener happens to be looking the
other way; and then--

As I said before, I dreamed that I was standing near a crowd of
prosperous-looking angels, and a policeman took me by the wing and
asked if I belonged with them.

"Who are they?" I asked.

"Why," said he, "they are the men who hired working-girls, and paid 'em
five or six dollars a week to live on. Are you one of the bunch?"

"Not on your immortality," said I. "I'm only the fellow that set fire to
an orphan asylum, and murdered a blind man for his pennies."

THE CALIPH, CUPID AND THE CLOCK

Prince Michael, of the Electorate of Valleluna, sat on his favourite
bench in the park. The coolness of the September night quickened the
life in him like a rare, tonic wine. The benches were not filled; for
park loungers, with their stagnant blood, are prompt to detect and fly
home from the crispness of early autumn. The moon was just clearing the
roofs of the range of dwellings that bounded the quadrangle on the east.
Children laughed and played about the fine-sprayed fountain. In the
shadowed spots fauns and hamadryads wooed, unconscious of the gaze of
mortal eyes. A hand organ--Philomel by the grace of our stage carpenter,
Fancy--f