sk her what games she had played, or who had been her
play-friend. Yet even there in the quiet woods I knew that Edward was
holding her back from me. It is true that, in his boy's way, he had
been fond of me; but I should not have dared to take her out without
him in the days when his live lips had filled the beach with song,
and his small brown body had danced among the surf. Now it seemed
that I had been disloyal to him.

And presently we came to a clearing where the leaves of forgotten
years lay brown and rotten beneath our feet, and the air was full of
the dryness of death.

"Let's be going back. What do you think, Dorothy?" I said.

"I think," she said slowly,--"I think that this would be a very good
place to catch beetles."

A wood is full of secret noises, and that is why, I suppose, we
heard a pair of small quick feet come with a dance of triumph
through the rustling bracken. For a minute we listened deeply, and
then Dorothy broke from my side with a piercing call on her lips.

"Oh, Edward, Edward!" she cried; "Edward!"

But the dead may play no more, and presently she came back to me with
the tears that are the riches of childhood streaming down her face.

"I can hear him, I can hear him," she sobbed; "but I cannot see him.
Never, never again."

And so I led her back to the motor. But in her tears I seemed to
find a promise of peace that she had not known before.

Now Edward was no very wonderful little boy; it may be that he was
jealous and vain and greedy; yet now, it seemed as he lay in his
small grave with the memory of Dorothy's flowers about him, he had
wrought this kindness for his sister. Yes, even though we heard no
more than the birds in the branches and the wind swaying the scented
bracken; even though he had passed with another summer, and the dead
and the love of the dead may rise no more from the grave.

The Story Of A Book

I. THE WRITER

The history of a book must necessarily begin with the history of its
author, for surely in these enlightened days neither the youngest nor
the oldest of critics can believe that works of art are found under
gooseberry-bushes or in the nests of storks. In truth, I am by no
means sure that everybody knew this before the publication of "The
Man Shakespeare," and for the sake of a mystified posterity it may be
well to explain that there was once a school of criticism that
thought it indecent to pry into that treasure-