d happened! It was as if an inner light had been switched
on; a warm white light which tingled through to every fibre of her
being. Surely this was the flame divine! It was her soul being born
anew...

CHAPTER II. "Your True Friend, Melissa M."

Missy knew, the moment she opened her eyes, that golden June morning,
that it was going to be a happy day. Missy, with Poppylinda purring
beside her, found this mysterious, irradiant feeling flowing out of
her heart almost as tangible as a third live being in her quaint little
room. It seemed a sort of left-over, still vaguely attached, from the
wonderful dream she had just been having. Trying to recall the dream,
she shut her eyes again; Missy's one regret, in connection with her
magical dreams, was that the sparkling essence of them was apt to become
dim when she awoke. But now, when she opened her eyes, the suffusion
still lingered.

For a long, quiet, blissful moment, she lay smiling at the spot where
the sunlight, streaming level through the lace-curtained window, fell on
the rose-flowered chintz of the valances. Missy liked those colours very
much; then her eyes followed the beam of light to where it spun a prism
of fairy colours on the mirror above the high-boy, and she liked that
ecstatically. She liked, too, by merely turning her head on the pillow,
to glimpse, through the parting of the curtains, the ocean of blue sky
with its flying cloud ships, so strange; and to hear the morning song
of the birds and the happy hum of insects, the music seeming almost to
filter through the lace curtains in a frescoed pattern which glided,
alive, along the golden roadway of sunshine. She even liked the
monotonous metallic rattle which betold that old Jeff was already at
work with the lawn-mower.

All this in a silent moment crammed to the full with vibrant ecstasy;
then Missy remembered, specifically, the Wedding drawing every day
nearer, and the new Pink Dress, and the glory to be hers when she should
strew flowers from a huge leghorn hat, and her rapture brimmed over.
Physically and spiritually unable to keep still another second, she
suddenly sat up.

"Oh, Poppylinda!" she whispered. "I'm so happy--so happy!"

Everyone knows--that is, everyone who knows kittens--that kittens,
like babies, listen with their eyes. To Missy's whispered confidence,
Poppylinda, without stirring, opened her lids and blinked her yellow
eyes.

"Aren't you happy, too? Say you're happy, Poppy, dar