stood behind her, brushing her curls with long, even strokes. The eyes of the two girls met in Elsie’s glass. Flashingly, Kate was glad she had made up a face and got it over with; otherwise she would certainly have made up just the same face now, at Elsie, before thinking.

The pairs of eyes held each other in the glass for an instant. It must have been something deceiving in the twin lights glowing at either side of Elsie’s mirror, or in the glass itself, Kate decided afterward, but for that instant it seemed that a comrade had looked questioningly out of the mirror at her! But the hidden comrade, if such it was, vanished even before Kate had time to turn away.

What a delicious bed Aunt Katherine had given her! She delighted in its scented linen and light covers. She punched the fluffy pillows up into a bolster, slipped out of her dressing gown and in between the smooth, lavender-scented sheets. Sitting there against the pillows she took “The King of the Fairies” on to her knee. She couldn’t sleep quite yet, she knew. Why, at home she seldom went to bed before her mother, and now it was not yet nine. The very sight, even the feeling of this book in her hands filled her with a happy stir deep in the far wells of imagination. She opened it casually. Any place would do since she already knew it practically by heart. The very sight of the smooth, clearly printed pages with their wide margins freed her. She was ready for space now and clear, disentangled adventurings into light.

Although the book was titled “The King of the Fairies” it was not at all a fairy story for children. Kate had only just reached the age when it could be cared about. It began with a girl and a boy quarrelling on a fence in a meadow. It was a real quarrel, a horrid quarrel with hot and sharp and bitter words. But it is interrupted by a tramp happening by. He asks them a direction and they stop their recriminations for the time to point him his way scornfully. Accepting their directions he still tarries a while to ask them if they themselves don’t want some pointing. Then the story, the marvellous story begins. He points to an elder bush and asks them what it is. They tell him glibly. Then he gets on to the fence between them and with his eyes level with theirs asks them to look again. Everything is changed for the girl and boy in that instant. They begin seeing as the tramp sees. They are in Paradise or Fairyland: the author himself makes no clear distinction. But the elder bush is now much more than an elder bush. And the meadow is full of a life the girl and boy had never suspected. There are other beings moving in it, fairy beings, 

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