smiled indulgently, and she seized the license of his humor, and carried volume xi. to its own space on the shelves.

Encouraged craftily by her amused father, Helen chatted on to her friend Gertrude, and of her. Mrs. Leavitt was shocked, but did not dare show it, and what would have been the use? Nothing! she knew. But she did so disapprove of Richard’s encouraging the child in the habit of telling “stories”—to name very mildly such baseless and brazen fabrications.

Hugh was puzzled, but not unsympathetically so, and less puzzled than might have been expected of so stolid a boy, and at so self-absorbed an age.

Stephen was uneasy and angry. He thrilled somewhat to Helen’s fancy, but he disliked both her claim and his own emotion to it.

He

All three of these children (for why beat longer about our bush?) in ways totally, almost antagonistically different, were somewhat “psychic.”

No one suspected it, much less knew it—and they themselves least of all. Hugh could not. Stephen would not. Helen was too young.

Psychic science or revelation had not, in those days, had much of a look in socially. And in Oxshott it had barely been heard of—merely heard of enough to give Ignorance a meaningless laugh. Spiritual planes and delicate soul-processes would seem to have little vibration with that environment of mundane interests and financial aggrandizement. But the souls of the other plane peep in through odd nooks, and work in seemingly strange ways. And, too, this one group of people, for all their wealth and their luxuries, lived rather “apart”—they were in the social swim—to an extent, and in the commercial ether up to their necks, but even so, in it, they were in another, and perhaps a more real and significant, way “cloistered” in it: apart.

“Gertrude is sleepy. I am sleepy too. Gertrude says: ‘Good-night, Helen.’ Good-night, Gertrude.”

Bransby swung her up to his shoulder and carried her off to bed. And Hugh, at a gesture of an imperious little hand, gathered up the two dolls, and followed after with them carefully. Helen was a motherly little thing—intermittently, and had her children to sleep with her—sometimes. The chain of flowers lay dying and forgotten.

CHAPTER VI

Stephen was not happy. He 

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