that the author must be a very wonderful person, a great man in some field of life. Perhaps that was why he had not signed his name to the work.

As Kate read now, the conversation between Elsie and Bertha in the next room was a humming undertone to her thoughts. She could not have caught their words if she had listened. But she had no inclination to listen. She was moving in a world where quarrels and bitter feelings were an impossibility. She was seeing things through the eyes of the King of the Fairies. She was in the meadows that she knew at home, feeling the larger life there that the King of the Fairies had made known to her. She was standing, tall, in the body of an elm tree, spreading with its leaves to the sun, feeling with its roots into the vibrating ground.

Suddenly a voice came to her. It was a long way she rushed back to find the voice. Bertha was standing beside her bed.

“Shall I turn out your light, Miss Kate? Or do you wish to read?”

Kate did not know that Bertha had come into the room at all. Elsie’s light was out, and if the doors through must be left open, Kate’s light would disturb her. Of course she must put out her light and try to sleep. She was on the verge of saying, “I will put out my own light, thanks,” but the meadow from which she had rushed back had, oddly enough as some might think, put her into more perfect harmony with her own restricted four walls. So she said, “You may put the light out, thank you.” And she did not even smile to herself when Bertha bent over the table and pulled at the little chain that was much nearer Kate’s reach than hers. She accepted the service naturally, since such acceptance was Aunt Katherine’s wish and the purpose of Bertha’s presence here.

“Good-night,” Bertha spoke out of the sudden darkness.

“Good-night,” Kate answered. Then soft footfalls, and she was alone in the room.

But though “The King of the Fairies” had done a good deal for Kate it had not had time to do enough to make her call a “good-night” to Elsie. Suppose Aunt Katherine knew the two girls were going to sleep without a word to each other!

From her bed, now that the room was dark, Kate could see the dim apple orchard under starlight. She rose on her elbow and strained her eyes for the outlines of the little orchard house. She found it by hard looking. How mysterious, how lonely, still how alive out there it stood. And she had heard a door 

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