body play on such a hot morning? Look here; we won't play at castles at all to-day. I'm going to get a book and read under the walnut-tree; we'll all read."

"Oh !"

"We can play at castles any other time, Theo." So I said, but Thee seemed to feel how things were going to be.

I wish I could forget the sound of her voice when she exclaimed "O Madeleine!" and the down look of the white little face. Gladys said everything was a bore; and she went away by herself somewhere, and I took my book quite contentedly, and stretched myself under the delightful shade and read "The Swan's Nest among the Reeds."

Thee hung about for a little time and kicked the clinging plants, and pulled leaves to pieces, and all at once when I looked up, I missed her, and so plunged into the reeds with Ellie, free at last from any teasing link with my home-life. Twice afterwards I thought that I caught a glimpse of Theodora's pinafore amongst the shrubs which lay between me and the house. I thought I saw her go and come, but there was no impression of her on my mind, and I really knew nothing until the sight of Gladys burst upon me. She came leisurely along the path from the back-garden that led to the kitchen, and she came from the kitchen, I soon saw, for she had a large basket on her arm, which seemed to weigh heavily on her. She tugged it along with a will, however; and she looked very merry when she set it down at my feet with a great thud and an exclamation of satisfaction.

"Now then, wake up, Mad child!" cried Gladys, in that matterof-fact tone of hers that always did wake me up thoroughly.

Ellie and her Swan's Nest were

thrown face downwards into the grass, and I began to watch Gladys eagerly. She did not want me to help her, and I liked best to watch. First she took a white cloth out of her basket, and this she spread at my feet, and then came the delightful preparations for a garden picnic, which was one of our summer holiday treats. Gladys and I became quite as childish as Theodora on these occasions. I can speak for myself that I was greedy about nice things to eat-greedy, but not fanciful; Gladys was fanciful more than greedy; and Thee was anything and everything that we were.

"Mother knows, of course," Gladys explained, looking up at me, whilst she piled cakes and fruit upon our doll's plates. "Mother knows, and, Madeleine, she says we're not to come into the house at all the whole afternoon, if we can amuse ourselves out of doors. She didn't say why, Madeleine. What can the reason be, do you think?"

"Oh, mother has got letters to write, or Wynne's asleep, or somebody has a headache or something. What can it matter, Gladys ?" I answered. Nothing ever did matter much to me that concerned other people. "Let us begin. Shall we?"

"Come along then, Mad; and we can put shares of everything by Thee's place, so it will be all right whenever she turns up."

This garden picnic stands out in my memory as the one great feast of our summers. I enjoyed it entirely without any drawback, and so did Gladys; and the little extra care we took that Thee should miss nothing, gave a happy sense all the time that there was no selfishness in our pleasure. I always liked to think well of myself: it was Gladys who really cared about Thee having

her share. I cared about having cared for her.

We took a long time over the many changes of our merry meal. I made lots of jokes, and told Gladys scraps of stories, and Gladys listened in her lazy fashion, never so much absorbed in a tale as not to know which apricot was the ripest, or to discriminate exactly the most tempting morsel of cake that had fallen to her share. It always surprised me about Gladys that she could perfectly well do two things at once. I think we must have been quite an hour eating and talking when at last Thee came up, running in the beedless way she had if she was brimful of something she wanted to tell us. All at once the eager look left her eyes, and the words she had been so keen to speak remained unspoken. Theodora had taken in at a glance the whole state of the case before her. There had been a grand garden picnic under the walnuttree, and it had been begun and enjoyed and finished without her. "You have had a feast! exclaimed Theodora. "You've quite finished."

After that we could not persuade her to eat a crumb. It was feasting with us she cared about. She must always be close to us, sharing quite from the core of anything we did, to care at all about it. By-and-by Gladys threw a handkerchief over her face to keep the flies off, or perhaps to keep out the sight of Thee's sulking; and I was just getting up to stroll away by myself somewhere in the sultry afternoon, when I noticed Theo take something out of her pocket, and I stopped a minute to see what the child had got. She seemed anxious then to have her little pleasure, whatever it was, all to herself, for she said nothing to me as I stood

watching her. I saw that she had a small bottle of water in her hand, which she held up to the light, and there was a little fish in the bottle. One of the sticklebacks out of the stream that ran outside the garden I supposed, and wondered how Thee had caught the little fish, and what she was going to do with it.

I have often been puzzled since why the afternoon which succeeded that garden-feast impressed itself so vividly on my memory, for it was an afternoon of no impression in itself, yet I can recall almost every moment of the lazy hours after the last sight I got of Theodora looking at her little fish and of Gladys propped against the tree-trunk. That day was, in fact, a day of sorrowful import for lives bound up with the lives of us children; but I had no cognisance of it then. I was only aware, as I have often been since, of a deadened consciousness, an incapacity to feel the pleasure that everything outside seemed to be offering me; each beautiful thing was, as it were, holding up a cup of delight that somehow I could never take. I grew discontented with myself and all the world, and it did not improve my temper - when at last the beneficent day being really over, sunlight fading, flowers closing, birds roosting, and mother outside the drawing-room window which opened on to the lawn stood waiting for us to run to her and say Good night-that just then I came upon Theodora and found her in trouble again, disappointed and unhappy for the third time upon one of our holidays. Gladys had been teasing her, and there had been a quarrel, which I could have prevented if I had been with them, I knew; but I repelled the thought of it as if it were an injury to myself, and relieved my mind by tugging Theodora where

she lay under a bush with her face in the grass, sobs shaking her poor little body. Gladys ran off to mother as I came up and began to question the child as to what had happened. Thee didn't tell me anything, only at last, when I got her up from the ground, she showed me the little stickleback lying still and limp in her hand, and sobbed out through her tears, "I did love my little fish." So that was all-but oh, how unhappy it makes me to remember that I lost all patience with the child!

Did ever any child love a mother as Theodora loved our mother! But love was the key that opened every door in Theodora's life. I form a picture to myself of the motive force of people's lives. I call it the key that opens the world to them. I know quite well about myself that curiosity is my key. I only care to see and taste and know, and so I go on and open door after door, and look in and touch and taste and handle, and I am not changed by the knowledges. I have got them and I lay them aside, and they are things to dally with and keep, but they remain outside my own self all the time.

Gladys is different. What I am going to say about her will seem as if she were the more selfish of us two, but it is not so-only hers is a different sort of selfishness. Use or shall I say profit ?—is the key by which Gladys opens the storehouses of the world; she has no other way. She takes what she wants, and all that she gets adds to her yes, I think I may say adds to her, and not only to her possessions. Theodora's key was love. It was nothing to her to know or to have; but wherever she loved there she knew, and what she knew she did not take for herself, but gave herself to it,

and hers was the self-losing that is absolute possession. "What I think of, Madeleine," she said to me once, looking up from some small childish labour she was busy about, the fruits of which she was planning to offer to our mother by-and by-"what I think about, Madeleine, is mother's face when she sees it." Mother's-oh yes; but still, my little Thee, it is your face I picture now, and I thrill yet with that darting glance which pierced me through as you looked up and spoke. And mother never made an especial pet of the child.

I used to notice sometimes that the little one slipped between the favoured places in our family. I was the eldest, Gladys was the beautiful one, our half-brother Wynne was the youngest and above us all, the son; Theodora was not anywhere in particular, and she wasn't clever or pretty, only a slippery, freaky little creature, without any marked individuality. What was Theodora, after all? The one of us that could

Not even on one

love the most. She loved our mother so much that she never missed anything from her, or noticed when she appeared to have been forgotten. of her birthdays, when nobody had thought of getting her a present; but at last an orange was found, the only one in the house that day. Then what fun she made of the presentation of the family gift, and how earnestly she insisted upon sharing it with us all!

Theodora's birthday came in the winter. Nature is niggardly in the cold season; she does not dower winter children as she does those who come with the fair tints and scents of summer. Our Gladys, for example, was a pink June rose, I was a dream-child of spring promise, Wynne first saw the light in the rich autumn season of fruits and corn and

floods of golden glory. But for Theodora's day not a flower could have been found or a green leaf. She was a December baby. There was Christmas for her month, and my tenderest recollection of her comes from the last Christmas Eve that we children spent all together. We used to keep Christmas Eve in a way peculiar to ourselves. After a very moderate amount of games and snap - dragon in the drawing-room we said Good night, and crept willingly enough upstairs to bed. But this was only the beginning of a night of revel, for though we undressed and lay down, and even snuggled under the bed-clothes, and assumed every appearance of settling for a night's rest, we were far too conscious of coming fun to hail sleep from a long way off. We kept quiet though, with one eye at least shut, and were skilful in giving ourselves the impression that we were not seeing what happened regularly every year at about eleven o'clock on Christmas Eve. The bedroom door opened softly (Gladys and Thee and I shared a large bedroom between us)-the door opened, and mother came in on tiptoe with a large basket on her arm. She held a bedroom lamp in one hand, crimson-shaded, and the glow from it tinted her face with warm rose-colour. She walked along, not on tiptoe any longer, as she trod over the thick carpet at our bedsides. Then the lamp was laid down, and the basket was opened, and in every child's stocking (each of us had hung a stocking at the foot of her bed) were crammed the Christmas gifts. Then the mother passed out again softly, as she had come in. The head of Gladys was the first to lift itself from the pillow after the closing of the door: Gladys looked up and round the room. Then a jet of flame would leap from the

fire, and there was a rustling and a titter, and sounds of smothered glee from Theodora's crib in the far corner, and a noise of leaping from the bed and of a stocking being dragged clattering along the floor. In a few minutes we were all three dressed as for the day, sitting round the fire strewing our treasures about us on the floor, feasting upon chocolates and oranges. The flames leaped and roared. Gladys had heaped wood upon the coals before dressing.

Eight such glorious Christmas Eves I can remember; but just now I concern myself with one onlyour very last. It was the Christmas after that August day when, I said, that trouble of some hidden sort began to work amongst us. It had been growing since then, not quite hiding even of late, for mother's face had changed, and what surprised us more than anything was, that mother had gone away from home two days before Christmas, and she had never left us before at such a time that we could remember.

Still the presents had all been prepared for us, and some one was to fill the stockings after we were in bed, and the fire was to be made up, and the little ones' Christmas was to be as much the same as possible for when did mother ever forget what concerned the pleasures of her children? On this last occasion she had left word that Wynne was to share in the midnight feasting and fun. The whole scene was like magic to Wynne when, fetched by Gladys, he came trotting in dressed in a many-coloured dressing-gown, and with bare little feet, his rich auburn hair tumbled and glistening in the fitful fire-light.

It was our fault that the little fellow became fretful by-and-by; we fed him too sumptuously with our good things, and as a conse

A

quence he fell out with Theodora. Mother had made for Theodora with her own hands the prettiest pair of red slippers, and Thee danced about the room in them, pointing her toes, and making pretty steps to show them off, until Wynne fell so desperately in love with the shoes that he insisted upon Theodora giving them up to him. I never knew Theodora refuse anything to Wynne before. I think she was feeling through everything that mother was away, and her love-thermometer was disturbed. She would not let Wynne have her little red shoes. regular quarrel was about to begin when we all sprang up at the first note of the Christmas carols sounding under the rectory window. The waits, five singers out of the church choir, had leave to come into the garden and stand on the lawn (just under the room where we children slept); and at one o'clock every Christmas morning they stood there and sang the same old words. We used to crowd into the window-space and draw the curtains round behind us, so as not to be too visible, and watch and listen.

The scene of that night lies clear in my memory. The lawn was white with snow, and the shrubs were all drooping with their cold burdens. Clouds covered the sky, and everything looked dark compared with our glowing room inside. The men had a lantern, but no books or music; their caps were drawn closely down over their faces; they were muffled in thick comforters. We pointed them out to each other by the nicknames we had given them many Christmases ago. When the usual carols were all sung, the lantern-man lifted up his light to greet us, and the others shouted "Good morning and a happy Christmas!" and the children's heads nodded, and they called

was

out their "Happy Christmas" too. Then we slipped through the curtains back into the littered room, and somehow everything changed. Wynne began to cry a little, and Gladys took him off to bed. Theodora threw herself full length on the rug before the fire, the red shoes still on her feet, declaring that she meant to lie there until

the morning. Gladys and I gathered up our treasures, undressed leisurely, chatting, and at last settled in our beds. Very soon Gladys was asleep in hers; I, lying wide awake, watched the red glow on the walls, and was wandering pleasantly into the land of inventions when a deep sigh coming from Theodora by the fire stopped me. "Tiresome child," I thought,

never mind her." But another sigh came and another, and a sound of wailing in between, until at last, unable to forget it all, I called to her, "Come along, Thee, come into bed with me." But instead, Thee got up with a desperate groan and ran out of the room without a word. "Got the toothache, perhaps," thought I, "and gone to ask Emma for something to do her good," and with that I turned myself round in bed. I was nearly asleep when I felt some one cuddling up to me, clutching at my throat with chilled fingers.

"How cold you are, child, and how you have frightened me! What is the matter? What are you shaking for?"

"Hush, Madeleine! don't wake Gladys. I want to tell you someYou thing, something dreadful. know the passage window close to the apple-tree?"

"Where the blind is torn across?"

"The blind's torn quite away now, and the window is bare." "Well- ""

"There is a man standing in the apple-tree close to the window; I