"I'm not marked with it. I've got a birthmark, but it's a strawberry, on my left side, like the princesses have in the fairy tales."

"You are a kind of a princess, Miss Judy."

"Is that a bad thing to be, Nana?"

"It's a lonesome thing."

"My strawberry's fading. Mother says it will go away."[Pg 5]

[Pg 5]

"It won't go away. What we're born to be, we will be, Miss Judy——. Bless your heart, you're crying, with the big eyes of you. What for, dear?"

"I don't know. I don't want to be a princess. I don't want to be lonesome. I hate the Everards."

"Well, there's many to say that now, and there'll be more to say it soon." Norah muttered this darkly, into her yellow bowl of apples, but Judith heard: "Here, eat this apple, child. You musn't hate anybody."

"I do. I hate the Everards."

Queer things came into your head to say when you were talking with Norah, who had an aunt with the second sight, and told beautiful fairy tales herself, and even believed in fairies; Judith did not. The Everards gave Judith and no other little girl in town presents at Christmas, and invited Judith and no other little girl to lunch. They had a great deal to do with her trouble, her serious trouble, which she would not discuss even with Norah. But she did not really hate the Everards—certainly not to-night. She was too happy.

Judith was going out to hang May-baskets.

So was every other little girl in town who wanted to, and it was a wonderful thing to be doing to-night. It was really May night, by the weather as well as the calendar—the kind of night that[Pg 6] Norah's fairies meant should come on the first of May: warm, with a tiny chill creeping into the air as the dark came, a pleasant, shivery chill, as if there might really be fairies or ghosts about. It was still and clear. One star, that had just come up above the horse-chestnut tree, looked very small and bright and close, as if it had climbed up into the sky out of the dark, clustering leaves of the tree.

[Pg 6]

This was the star 

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