ad and reached out his arms.

"You blessing!" he said. "You blessing from the Lord!"

Then he gave me a cold, stiff kiss on the forehead, went to mother,
took her arm, and said: "Come, mommy, let's go and tell the Lord about
it, and then we'll try to make some plan. Perhaps Laddie will be back
with word soon."

But he almost had to carry her. Then we could hear him praying, and he
was so anxious, and he made it so earnest it sounded exactly like the
Lord was in our room and father was talking right to His face. I tried
to think, and this is what I thought: as father left the room, he
looked exactly as I had seen Mr. Pryor more than once, and my mother
had both hands gripped over her heart, and she said we must not let any
one know. Now if something could happen to us to make my father look
like the Princess' and my mother hold her heart with both hands, and if
no one were to know about it like they had said, how were we any
different from Pryors? We might be of the Lord's anointed, but we
could get into the same kind of trouble the infidels could, and have
secrets ourselves, or at least it seemed as if it might be very nearly
the same, when it made father and mother look and act the way they did.
I wondered if we'd have to leave our lovely, lovely home, cross a sea
and be strangers in a strange land, as Laddie said; and if people would
talk about us, and make us feel that being a stranger was the
loneliest, hardest thing in all the world. Well, if mysteries are like
this, and we have to live with one days and years, the Lord have mercy
on us! Then I saw the money lying on the table, so I took it and put
it in the Bible. Then I went out and climbed the catalpa tree to watch
for Laddie.

Soon I saw a funny thing, such as I never before had seen. Coming
across the fields, straight toward our house, sailing over the fences
like a bird, came the Princess on one of her horses. Its legs
stretched out so far its body almost touched the ground, and it lifted
up and swept over the rails. She took our meadow fence lengthwiselike,
and at the hitching rack she threw the bridle over the post,
dismounted, and then I saw she had been riding astride, like a man. I
ran before her and opened the sitting-room door, but no one was there,
so I went on to the dining-room. Father had come in, and mother was
sitting in her chair. Both of them looked at the Princess and never
said a word.

She stopped inside the dining-room