running to the rescue and picked her up, a forlorn little heap with a face as white as her frock. 

"I fell out myself!" she said with quivering lips. "I fell out all my own self." 

Young Christopher, who had clambered down the ladder from the loft, broke in violently: 

"She didn't! It was my fault! She made me wild, and I pushed her. I didn't think she'd be so silly as to fall, though," he added, with an angry look at her. "And don't you trouble to tell lies about me." 

The groom said afterwards that she had not shed a tear till then, but at the angry words she broke down suddenly into bitter sobbing. 

She did not mind her broken arm, but she minded having offended Christopher. It was the greatest trouble she had ever known when— as a consequence of the accident—Christopher was sent away to a boarding school. 

Hereafter she only saw him by fits and starts during the holidays, and then he seemed somehow quite different. 

He took but little notice of her, and he generally brought a friend 3 home with him from school. He was getting beyond the "boy" stage, and developing a wholesome contempt for girls as a whole! 

3

When—later—he went to a public school, he forgot to ignore her, and took to patronizing her instead. She wasn't such a bad little thing, he told her, and next term if she liked she might knit him a tie. 

Marie knitted him two—which he never wore! She would have blacked his boots for him if he had expressed the slightest wish for her to do so. 

Then, later still, he went to Cambridge and forgot all about her. He hardly ever came home during vacation save for week-ends; he had so many friends, it seemed, and was in great demand amongst them all. 

Marie could quite believe it. She was bitterly jealous of these unknown friends, and incidentally of the sisters which she was sure some of them must have! 

She was still at school herself, and her soft brown hair was tied in a pigtail with a large bow at the end. 

"You'll soon have to put your hair up if you grow so fast, Marie," Miss Chester said to her rather sadly, when at the end of one term she came home. 

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