Table of Contents

Birthday Girl

IT WAS the fifth of April. Also it was a very fine day. Further, it was Daphne’s birthday—the eighteenth. Besides this, it was a Thursday, the jour de sortie, when all the girls who had friends and relations were taken away into the bosom of families. Daphne had no relations or friends in any of the tall, flat-faced, green-shuttered houses in the town, nor did any family of hers have its address at any of the white villas that slept in green gardens out among the orchards.

She was not the only one whom no mother called for, no white-capped, prim-lipped bonne escorted through the gay, interesting, alive streets. Inez de Mattos, her people owned a castle in Spain, and no visitors ever called to see her; Guilberte, her people were in Paris; Madeleine had no relations; and Columbine Pinsent’s grandfather was packing in far away Chicago the pork that should make her an heiress. And there were others.

Columbine was to leave at Midsummer, to cross the ocean and take up those honours wrung from protesting pigs. Little Inez would be at school for a long while yet. Madeleine was to be a nun someday, and Guilberte would only leave school to be married. Daphne—well, Daphne had always been at school, and she hated it, and loved it, and was bored by it, and interested in it, and felt for it all the ebb and flow of varied emotion which girls feel for their homes.

The sun shone with a clear sparkle on the ivy leaves that framed the refectory windows. Long, narrow horse-shoe tables, spread with coarse, unbleached linen, were outlined by a vivid, varying fringe of girls, mostly eating thin soup and wide slabs of pain de ménage. The English girls ate eggs and drank chocolate. The whole seventy-four were gesticulating like monkeys and chattering like parrots. For Thursday was a holiday. And on holidays one might talk at meal times without fear or restraint. On other days, if one talked, it had to be done without moving one’s lips, in a voice too low to be heard above the clatter of plate and spoon and the setting down of the yellow mug after drinking. Daphne had invented this way of talking, and in it she and Columbine were easily first.

“I’ve arranged everything,” said Columbine, breaking her eggs into her mug and mixing them with vinegar and salt. Usually it was Daphne who arranged everything, but this being her birthday, etiquette demanded a temporary abdication. “Marie Thibault’s to get her brother to go back to college to fetch a ball he’ll say he lost in the garden. And he can lower the things to us over the wall. It was thoughtful of those old chaps to build the boys’ school next to the girls’ school, wasn’t it?”

“It was all one convent once,” said Daphne, through a mouthful of toast. Those whom the cook loved had toast with their eggs – slices of toast as big as little tea-trays and very much thicker. “We’re going to have the loveliest feast,” she went on, stooping to the round-eyed, thin-faced child beside her, “because it’s your Daffy’s birthday.”

“I know that,” said the child, superior; “hasn’t my Daffy wondered what its Dormouse has been doing all her playtime in wonderful secrecy?”

“I’ve wondered till I haven’t been able to sleep for wondering. What was it, honey of my heart?”

“You don’t think,” said the child, “that I could tell you the secret of my life now, all in the middle of the bread-and-butter and soup? Afterward, when all the girls have been fetched. Just you and me, alone in the garden—and Columbine, because she helped. Just us three and the secret splendidness.”

“I don’t know how I shall bear to wait,” said Daphne, who had found it hard, during these last weeks, to avoid knowing every stitch of the secret splendidness ardently worked at and hidden on her approach under the child’s black cotton sarrau.

“I’ve got a present for you, too,” said Columbine, “if Doris will let me give it after hers.”

“You’ve remembered what I said?” said Daphne, turning on her friend with a threatening frown. “I won’t stand any nonsense, you know——”

“I’ve remembered. But it’s hard to be forbidden to spend more than two francs on the only girl one ever loved, when one is——”

“When one is rolling in money—yes, fling your hateful money in my penniless face! I’m glad you remembered the day, though.” Her china-blue eyes were soft and bright.

“It’s the kind of date one does forget, isn’t it—the day that brought into the world the dearest, prettiest, cleverest, nicest——”

“Mademoiselle Carrmichel,” said the cool, clear voice of Madame from the crown of the horseshoe, “will remain after the others. I have to speak to her.”

“Oh, Coreopsis!” sighed Daphne—“Oui, Madame—Oh, Coreopsis, what have I done now!”

“And on your birthday, too. What have you done?”

“I don’t know,” said Daphne, hopelessly.

“When I do naughtiness,” observed Doris, with pride, “I always know.”

“There’s no mistake about your naughtiness, is there, my cabbage?” said Daphne, as the seventy-three rattled and rustled, rose and filed out. “Now for it. Wish me luck, Columbine, or rather pray to St. Nicholas. He’s the one who looks after naughty children. My doom is fixed—all is indeed over. Farewell. I’ll come out to the terrace as soon as I’ve caught it.”

“Caught what?” asked Doris, eagerly. “Oh, will you show it to me when you’ve caught it?” “I’ve no doubt I shall show it,” said Daphne ruefully. “Red eyes—on one’s birthday, too. Here goes!”

The terrace is built on a cliff that goes down a sheer forty feet to the white road that follows the winding line of the river. This is why the pupils at the most select school in provincial France are allowed to walk there without surveillance, and to look out, from that safe height, on the dangers and temptations of the wicked world. And in safety. Little stray wavelets of the great sea of iniquity that surges outside school boundaries sometimes dash themselves against that tremendous fortification, but always in vain.

When an impressionable Polish artist, fired by the vision of cloudy blond hair and blue and white, the festival dress of an enfant de Marie, purchased a bow, and, winging his arrow with an impassioned billet addressed to La Belle Blonde, shot at the terrace, his shaft stuck in one of the clipped beech-trees of the terrace berceau, and the first person to see it was Madame.

“Hold!” she said, “what a droll of a bird! The gardener shall fetch it down tomorrow—with the ladder.”

And, on the morrow, by means of the ladder, the gardener did bring down an innocent arrow, winged with the blank sheet of an exercise book—because Daphne, adventurous, prompt, and alleging a finger cut in the sharpening of a pencil, had escaped from the afternoon drawing-class, her hand bound in a handkerchief where crimson lake and burnt sienna artfully simulated gore. She had run like a deer to the terrace, climbed the tree, disengaged the billet of adoration, replaced it by a folded blank paper, and got back to her sympathising class, when she had torn up and buried the amoristic effusion—less in the interest of school discipline than in that of the enfant de Marie. The adventure made her happy for a week. It satisfied that sense of personal competence to any crisis that the routine of school was inadequate to feed.

It was Daphne, too, who discovered the northwest passage. All along the top of that part of the old convent, which was now the modern girls’ school, ran a great garret, eighty or ninety feet long. It was next to the box-room where the trunks of pupils were kept, the trunks where clothes not in use were stored and books not judged suitable for school reading. The box-room was only visited under strictest supervision. At the back of it was a pile of old lumber—things cast out of use, but by some thrifty hand not cast out of house and home—dusty brown saddles, the tangled straps of broken harness; dressers and settles and chairs that no one wanted any more; the carved throne of a bishop, all Gothic tracery and tarnished gilding; the broken, heaped up, angular woodwork of the old chapel, and, God knows how it came into a convent, a squarely-knit oaken cradle.

It was Daphne who spied, beyond all, a light gleam through the shadows of this outworn usefulness, and longed to explore what she knew was a hole or a door in the corner of the partition wall. But surveillance was too keen. In the big garret, however, where the seed potatoes were kept, and the heaps of turnips and carrots and haricot beans, where the onions and the cobwebs hung from the rafters, there was no surveillance—because there was no right of entry. Everyone knew where the key of the grenier hung in the portress’s lodge, but it was Daphne who, light-footed and light-fingered, lifted it from its nail while the portress snored in the July afternoon quiet, stole up the many stairs three at a time, fleet as a climbing panther, opened the grenier door, and traversed, quiet and quick as any panther, its whole long length. The box-room was not forty feet long. There must be another room behind it. And there was. The partition did not reach to the outer wall—the rough ends of the laths stuck through the plaster toward the outer wall, but yet leaving a space where Daphne’s slimness might pass, did indeed, with a squeeze and a torn apron, pass unhurt. And now she was in a room lighted only by a skylight, the mate to the skylight in the grenier. and in front of her was the door in the wall and through it the mingled lines like broken scaffolding, of chair and table and heaped discarded furniture. She shifted a chair here, a table leg there—made a practicable tunnel through the heap, blocked it with old curtains; and henceforth everyone’s box and everyone’s confiscated literature was available at any hour and Daphne was the school heroine. The key that Marie Thibault’s brother had got made from a wax impression of the key that blinked in the sun on the wall of the portress’s lodge lay in Daphne’s deep under-pocket. And her heart was glad every time she felt its secret weight jog her knee.

Madame’s surveillance was strict; she thought that she knew everything in her girls’ lives. And, indeed, she did know most things till Daphne came to her kingdom—Daphne, whose father was a bookworm, whose grandfather was an explorer, whose great-grandfather was a lieutenant at Trafalgar.

Columbine and Doris went down through spring sunshine toward the terrace. The garden was covered with light veils of plum-blossom and little green new leaves, through which boughs and tree trunks still showed strongly black. The borders of the path were alight with anemones, early tulips, late daffodils, and the beginnings of the fallen sky of forget-me-nots. The high wall that lowered above the fruit trees bore a line of mingled fire and blood, wall-flowers red and brown and yellow. The larch by the old convent graveyard, away to the right, wore its new spring green studded with ruby buds. All about was the slender green promise of white lilac and the fat grey promise of flags. The beech alley was all grey stems touched with a million bright, hard buds.

“Like very sharp drawing-stumps, aren’t they?” said Columbine, as she and the child passed onto the shadow-netted stones of the terrace.

“Yes, just,” said the child, “and the trunks and the branches look as if they had been polished with black-lead. Have you got my present?”

“Next to my heart. Look!”

From the front of her dress she drew a little roll of pink tissue-paper, unrolled it, and showed the “secret splendidness”—a kettle-holder, bearing a kitten on a red cushion worked in Berlin wool, cross-stitched, grounded in blue, and lined and corded with crimson satin.

“It is like a dream of heaven,” said the child, in a hushed voice.

“It’s very, very beautiful,” said Columbine. “Mine’s not half so nice. And, mind you, don’t say mine’s nice or she won’t take it. Let’s play conquerors till she comes. There are lots here against the rose hedge.”

“We’ve played conquerors,” shouted Doris, as Daphne came quickly down the path, “for ever and ever, and I’ve won. Did she scold you very, very?”

Daphne reached them, a whirlwind of fluttered black pinafore and long red hair.

“Oh!” she cried, catching one in each arm. “Pinch me, both of you. Am I alive or am I dreaming? Am I the most wretched girl in the world or am I mad with joy? Pinch me, pinch me, and settle the question one way or the other.”

“What ever?” The three fell in a tumbled heap on the blue-green faded garden seat.

“Oh, my dears!” Daphne gasped. “We’re to go home tomorrow—Doris and me. I thought we never, never should, and I’m going to spend every penny I’ve got in a blow-out tonight. Madame goes to see her sister, and together they go to the Mayor’s ball. Course quite clear and I can get round old Claudine, and Miss Henney will be writing to her sweetheart. We’ll have the show of our lives. And then I shall never, never see you again, my Columbine!”

“Oh yes, you will,” said Columbine, aghast, but conscientiously consolatory. “I’ll come and see you the minute I leave school.”

“Oh no—I know you never will. Everything’s over forever, and I’m to put my hair up, so as to be respectable for travelling!”

Brigand Captain

UNDER the revolutionary rule of Daphne, secret revels had, before this, occurred. A masterly system of scouts, fleet and bare of foot, posted on commanding positions between the smallest dormitory and the mistresses’ salon, rendered the adventure so safe as to be hardly now an adventure at all.

But this last night of her school life Daphne meant to mark indelibly. It was to be something which should keep her memory green forever, so that to generation after generation of awed, admiring schoolgirls the tale should forever be whispered—and the name of Daphne, “une folle Anglaise capable de tout, mais bonne enfant,” should live always in the legends told at twilight. She caught Marie Thibault at the exact last minute before her exit; crammed a paper of instructions and all her money into Marie’s short, fat hand.

“It is for tonight,” she said, “thou wilt see. Forget nothing today, and tonight thou shalt see a fête that thou shalt never forget.”

This done, she borrowed a broom and a duster from old Claudine, the cook, and hid them till Madame should have been drawn away by two fat little piebald stallions in a dumpy waggonette to her sister’s country house.

Daphne was trusted by everyone—by her comrades, by the servants, by the mistresses, by Madame.

Her adventures were always too well arranged for detection to be possible, and her passionate energy was of the kind that makes days elastic and stretches them till they include all one’s duties as well as one’s pleasures. Her lessons were always done, and well done. It was she who organised the picnics, the presentations of flowers on birthdays, the dramatic scenes acted at prize-givings; gave out the seeds and plants for the girls’ gardens, helped backward children, petted the sad, and coaxed and encouraged the shy. If a favour was to be asked of anyone in authority, it was Daphne who did the asking. Madame praised her continually as a young girl well brought up; one who could be trusted to be as genteel when one had her not beneath the eye as the greater part of girls under the most careful surveillance. One could trust Daphne, she said, and thought. And Daphne, too, thought that she could be trusted. “I don’t do wrong things,” she told herself, “it’s so silly to do wrong.”—Because “of course,” she said, “little secret adventures are not wrong at all,” only natural and poignantly pleasant.

“If Madame knew we climbed trees and had feasts and all that, she’d have to stop it,” she said to Marie, on the first and last occasion when conscience reared its head at an apple-munching party. “It’s just an old tradition she’s got hold of—come down from the times when no one could do anything without being put into a secret dungeon in the Bastille for it. But just ask yourself. Is it wrong to eat apples? Is it wrong to climb trees? Is it wrong to have the things out of our boxes that our own relations meant us to have? Of course it isn’t. Well then!”

And the question was settled once and for all.

And now by ones and twos the girls were fetched by friends or maids or relations, and only the usual half a dozen remained. They sat on the terrace, and looked over the white and green of the valley, where the river ran under the beautiful stone bridges, ate sucre de pomme and matured their plans.

“Speak French, then,” said Madeleine. “I understand hardly three words.”

“How do you make such lovely poetry?” said Columbine.

“She spins it out of her inside, like a spider. Inside her there is metres and metres and metres,” said Doris hitting her sister’s waist belt. “Isn’t it, chérie?”

“Metres and metres,” agreed Daphne. “Now do you all understand what you’ve got to do? Madeleine and Inez, get the broom and duster—they’re in my bed, under the mattress, and you’ll sweep and dust the secret chamber, and get a lot of red blankets off the beds and spread them for carpets. Columbine and my Dormouse look through all the boxes and get out every single thing that looks as though it would be good for dressing up. Don’t take anything of ours. Our trunks have got to be packed today. Then all four of you get out tables and benches—you can make them stand up all right with bricks, there are lots of bricks in the grenier. And put the bishop’s throne up, if you can move it. I’ll go to the Alée défendue and get the things from little Thibault. There’s an awful lot to do. We ought to get it done before déjeuner. Now, let’s arrange our substitutes.” She dragged a bundle of cloaks and jackets from under the seat—the garden wraps that hung in the vestibule for the girls to wear in cold weather. Then she drew out a bundle of umbrellas. You can make a wonderfully good dummy by sticking a hood on an umbrella, folding a heavy cloak round it and arranging it in a garden seat.

“That’s you, Colombe,” said Daphne, contemplating the hideous folding of serge and silk that twenty yards away looked like a human being. “Now you run. Keep behind the espaliers and keep low. Rendez-vous at your desk. You’re going to get your embroidery if you’re caught. Mina you get it. Lies are of the devil. Now I’ll do Madeleine.”

Daphne, born general, had arranged her group at the one point where a budding sycamore obscured ever so little the view from the corridor windows. She arranged another deceptive heap. “Run, Madeleine,” she said, “and see why Columbine is so long gone.”

Madeleine giggled and ran.

Soon a convincing group occupied the stone seat and the twisted beech-root beside it, and all the girls were gone.

“’Tis well,” whispered Daphne, as she and Doris crept along behind the pear-blossom, “the secret deed is done, and no human eye has marked our proceedings,”

Daphne was wrong. Two human eyes had marked, with tepid but quickly warming interest, the making of that group on the curved stone seat. Those eyes were grey, and they looked, from very far, through a particularly good pair of racing-glasses.

“Well,” said he whom the eyes served. “I really am! Little villains—I wonder what devilry that’s the screen for!”

He lowered the glasses. Yes; it was good work. Anyone could have said, glancing terraceward, “A group of school-girls reading and sewing.”

“Mighty clever,” said he.

Daphne had counted only on the vantage point of the school corridor windows. She had not imagined it possible that anyone could scale the wall of the college next door and thence look down with racing glasses on her little world of school intrigue and adventure. And now the peace of a great freedom lay over the school. The tall porte cochère had closed behind Madame, and her sister’s piebald steeds, neighing joyously, had carried her away to the sister’s bald-faced villa. The mistresses had gone, each to her own place, and the English governess, today on duty, was rejoicing in the trustworthiness of Daphne, the priceless quality that made it possible for a hard-driven English girl to sit at her open window that the pear-blossom crept round and nodded into, closely covering thin grey sheets of foreign note-paper, and every now and then pausing to look at her life’s hidden joy and pride, or to flutter the leaves of the dictionary to make quite sure how one spelt “judgment” or “embarrassed” or “unnecessary.” The really important words, “love,” “hope,” “dearest,” are fortunately easy, even when one is a half-educated girl of twenty earning hard bread in a foreign land.

The very sunlight, now warm as an English June’s, lay more peacefully upon the garden, and the shadows of trees and buildings were dark and strong. Up in the grenier Daphne’s lieutenants were carrying out her orders with a pathetic exactness taught by experience. And Daphne herself, crouched in a clump of white lilac in the allée défendue where the sun shone warmest and all the leaves were already out, was whistling with perfect accuracy the morning song of the blackbird. The song ended. From the other side of the wall should have come the answering twitter of a young linnet. But no sound came. The garden was very silent. A bee buzzed in the wall-flowers on the grey crumbling buttresses. The wall-flowers nodded, drenching the air with perfume. The blackbird’s note sounded again. And this time there was a reply. A very faint and not convincing representation of the April notes of the cuckoo.

“Silly to change the pass-word,” Daphne told herself. “French boys always think they know better than you do.”

She stood, her hands behind her, erect, alert, looking up at the top of the wall. Something showed there, something that moved. A crowded blue handkerchief knotted at the corners. It remained a moment balanced at the top and slowly began to crawl down the wall. It descended some ten feet, then hung a yard above her reach.

“Little idiot,” said Daphne, “he ought to know the proper length by now!”

She dared not call out. She could not reach the packet. There was only one thing to do, and Daphne did it. She awaited events, and again the blackbird’s song rang shrill and true. Horror! The blue bundle was slowly drawn up and hung just below the wall’s level for any fool to see. If she could climb the chestnut that pressed close to the wall she might, or might not, be able to reach the cord.

And Marie Thibault should be instructed how to teach her little brother not to play tricks on an English girl.

Daphne made a leap, caught at a bough, and with a swift swing of black ankles disappeared in rustling green. The tree was easy to climb—the only reason she had never climbed it before was that there had been no need, and recreations needing time, like tree-climbing, were best taken elsewhere than in the allée défendue. Sure-footed, strong-handed, she went from bough to bough, up and up, pushing through the resilient twigs. The change in the light told her when she had reached the level of the wall’s top; she trusted herself to a stout bough that had grown straight toward the wall, and, then, baffled, grown at right angles to it; parted the leaves with her arms, caught at the wall and leaned there panting, her head thrown back and her hands gripping the coping stone on its farther side.

Swift as ever hawk swooped on pigeon two heavy, strong hands fell on her wrists.

“All is well,” said a voice in French with an accent unmistakable, “resty tron keel.”

Daphne had sense enough even in the suddenness and completeness of that shock, to move not at all, save to tighten her grip on the wall. She tried to see, but the hands had come out of the thick of the tree where its green waves surged over the wall-top. She could see only the hands and the cuffs—white flannel. There was a dark signet ring on one of the hands.

“Let me go,” she said, and her voice was low and fierce. “Otez vos mains! allez-vous en!”

“Oh,” said the other voice, “you’re English. That’s all right. Are you safe? I’m sorry if I startled you. I thought if I spoke you’d be more startled still, and if you’d come face to face with me—you would have in another moment—you’d have been startled out of your wits.”

“It takes a good deal,” said Daphne, firing, “to startle me out of my wits. Take your hands away, please.”

“Half a moment. Why didn’t you take your bundle?”

“I couldn’t reach,” said Daphne. “Cord too short. Who are you?”

“English master at the college. Are you safe if I let go?”

“Of course I’m safe,” said Daphne, impatiently, but the hands on her wrists did not move. “Look here,” he said, “go down the tree a bit—and I’ll come down too. We must talk this business over. Do as I tell you—don’t be a silly child. It’s all right. Go on.”

Daphne went. There seemed to be nothing else to do. She could, of course, get down and fly the scene, leaving the English spy to complete his treachery as he chose. But it would be more amusing to stay and tell him what she thought about him. Horrid, interfering old thing! Also to show him that she was not a child. She went down till she found a convenient branch, and, bracing her feet on it, leaned against another, safely away from the tree-trunk by which he must descend. The tree shook and shivered to the weight of that descent, and out of the green above her came a young man in flannels. He came to a stay on a bough a little below hers and their eyes, level, met for the first time.

“Why,” she said, “you’re quite young! I did think you were old. That would have been some excuse for you.”

“And you,” he said, “are quite old. I did think you were a child. That would have been some excuse for you.”

“I don’t want excuses,” said Daphne.

“Neither do I,” he said.

There was a pause. Again their eyes met.

“What I want,” he said, sternly, “is explanations.”

“Then we want the same thing,” said Daphne, shortly.

“Is it quite safe?” he asked anxiously.

“Do you think I’m a baby, or a Frenchman, to tumble out of a tree?” Scorn barbed the inquiry.

“I didn’t mean that. I mean, won’t they be looking for you, and won’t you get into a row if they find me here?”

“Nobody’ll find me here—unless you’ve sent a note round already to tell them where to look for me—or for someone looking out for a blue bundle.”

“If you’re sure you’re safe,” he said, “I don’t mind beginning the explanations. Only, please remember that I’m quite as bewildered as you, and, I should judge, much more embarrassed.”

“You don’t look it,” she said, and the grey eyes of him looked at her so frankly that she began to wonder. Was it possible that—? Oh thought to be buried forever under mountains of oblivion! No, Daphne! the young man is not a fairy prince who has seen you from afar and has taken this romantic means of offering you his hand, heart, and sceptre. Listen, he is telling you who he is. Listen, never mind if your ears are crimson, he can’t possibly know what reddened them. He may think they are always crimson. Loathsome thought. No, don’t think about that either. Listen.

“And so,” the young man was saying, “when I saw young Emil staggering in under a camel’s load of provender, with his arms so full of parcels that they stuck up above the level of his long, long ears, and when he told me he had come back for a ball he had mislaid, I was naturally interested in his regrettable lapse from truth. So I took him into my room, locked the door on him, his parcels, and the Grand Inquisitor—myself, gracious lady—and the inquiry by torture began.”

“You didn’t?” said Daphne.

“If milder measures had failed,” said he, “who knows? For my strongest passion was aroused. Curiosity. But he melted like wax before the flame of a crafty generosity. In return for a stick of chocolate Menier and a promise of eternal secrecy, he told me all. I promised to see things through for him, and bade him return to the bosom of his family, and we parted with expressions of mutual confidence and regard.”

“Do you always talk like a book?” Daphne asked, raising her chin a contemptuous half-inch.

“Only in the spring time, and when I’m in royal company. Permit me, tor the moment, to regard you as a fairy princess.”

That jumped too near the thought that writhed buried beneath oblivion’s mount. Daphne did not know what to say or where to look. So she looked straight at him under proud level brows, and said perhaps the best thing possible.

“I beg your pardon. It was very rude of me. Please go on.”

“Well—when I found that though the blackbird whistled—you do whistle like a bird, don’t you?—that though the blackbird whistled and the cuckoo replied——”

“It ought to have been a linnet,” said Daphne.

“Yes, but I don’t know how linnets talk. When I found that nothing happened I made the cord fast to a rusty nail, and hastening to my room I locked the door, climbed along the gutter to the wall, and reached the fatal spot at exactly the same moment as your highness. The agony of apprehension that led me to lay profane hands on the royal wrists has already been explained, and I trust pardoned?” He stopped abruptly on the question.

“Is it pardoned?” he insisted.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Daphne, confusedly. “It’s all right. Go on.”

“That’s all. Except that the youthful Thibault expressly warned me that sirop de groseille was part of the royal outfit for this evening’s banquet. Have I explained myself to the satisfaction of her highness?”

Daphne smiled. For the first time in her life she smiled in answer to a man’s smile, and because it was the first time, she smiled fully and frankly with her eyes in his. He drew back, a little dazzled. And there was a moment’s silence in the chestnut tree.

“Now tell me,” he said, “your side of the story.”

“There’s nothing—except that it’s my birthday, so I spent all my money on the feast tonight, and that’s why there was such a lot.”

“Your birthday! I wonder. May one offer a flower or two to her highness on the day of days?”

“You haven’t got any flowers. And you don’t know me. Why should you give me flowers?”

“The moth knows the star when it sees it.”

Daphne felt very uncomfortable. But it was a delicious discomfort.

“I ought to go now,” she said.

“But what about the royal feast?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” was what Daphne said, Daphne, the organiser, the born general. What she thought, with a fascinated new feeling of dependence, was, “Why should I bother? He’ll arrange it all.”

He answered the thought.

“Your highness is right. I’ll arrange it all. When you come—at two—three?—right! you’ll find everything in the lowest bough of this tree. Will that meet with her highness’s approval?”

“Yes—but you oughtn’t to call me that. I’m Daphne Carmichael.”

“And I’m Stephen St. Hilary. Pretty names both. So you’re the Princess Daphne. I thought you were the Princess Belle Etoile.”

“You talk a lot of nonsense,” said Daphne, vigorously shaking off this new spell, “but I’m very much obliged to you – and we’ll drink your health in the sirop de groseille tonight.”

“Shall you tell the others?” he asked curiously.

“Of course,” said Daphne, and wondered why she was so sure she would not tell them. Then she said, “I must go,” and suddenly held out her hand between the branches. “Good-bye,” she said, “thank you very much.”

He took the hand, bent, and kissed it.

“It’s only the royal salute,” he assured her when she snatched it away. She dropped from bough to bough, and as her feet touched earth she looked up; she could not help it. He was looking down. “Au revoir, Princesse,” he said, softly. “Everything shall be ready for you at three.”

She looked down. Before her lay the ordered sunlit quiet of the garden. It seemed a very long time since she had seen it. A very long time that she had spent in that green world of leafy transparencies, that strange world, between earth and heaven, where one was a princess and where one’s hand was——. She hid the hand hastily in the pocket of her black pinafore.

She had not noticed before that the box trees had little powdery flowers. Perhaps they had come out while she had been away.

Princess

IT WAS easy for Daphne, the daring, the trusted leader, to evade her comrades that afternoon. She told them nothing that was not true. “I could not get the things this morning,” she said. “I must try again now. You all sit on the terrace and do embroidery in open blamelessness. Your dauntless leader has the interests of the bandits at heart.”

“I do love you,” said Doris. “I love you extra when you talk like a book.”

It was not to Daphne the least of the day’s experiences to have learned that there was at least one other person in the world who could “talk like a book.” She had always thought before that she was the only one.

“Farewell, my faithful brigands,” she cried dramatically and kissed the smallest brigand on both cheeks; “here, in my bosom, I bear the magic secret.”

She showed a corner of the Berlin wool worked kettleholder. “That shall bring all our plans to a triumphant conclusion. Farewell! Punctuality and dispatch!” she added, and left them to their blamelessness.

She herself, the Daphne she had always known and mostly liked, slipped guiltily away behind the pear-trees to——

“To fetch the things,” she asserted, stoutly. But she could hardly hear herself speak for other words that sounded in her ears—“Princess Belle Etoile”—“moth and star”—and there was something about her hand that confused her when she thought of it.

“But, of course, he won’t be there,” she told herself, at every third step.

“If he is,” she found herself adding, “I hope I know how to behave. I was startled this morning—he said himself I was startled, and one isn’t oneself when one’s startled out of one’s wits. I shall behave with perfect dignity, and not let him call me Princesses and things. I don’t think I’ll go at all. I expect he’s been thinking me a horrid, forward, sentimental idiot.”

What he had been thinking was so different that, when he spoke to her, looking down to her fresh upturned face from among the quivering chestnut fans, his voice sounded like that of a stranger. (“So he is: of course he’s a stranger—you’ve only seen him once,” she told herself, with a quite distinct sinking at the heart.)

“Do come up, just a little way, Miss Carmichael,” he said. “I want to beg your pardon.”

Daphne set her foot on a mossy stone in the wall, and thence reached the lowest of the chestnut boughs.

“Here are all your cakes and sweets and candles and things,” he said; and indeed there they all were, in many-shaped, many-coloured packages, fastened to the chestnut boughs. “And here’s a forked branch just meant for an armchair. Do take it just for one moment.”

“I didn’t think you’d be here,” said she.

“Ah, you say that out of politeness,” he answered, and she wondered what he meant and was ashamed of her little lie. “After the idiotic way I behaved this morning, you must, I’m sure, have been afraid that I should be here again. The fact is, life as an English master in a French school is not a dazzling round of gaiety. And boredom tends to crime. The leads beyond my window give an excellent view of your wonderful garden. And I am ashamed to say I’ve sometimes watched you all, through my field glasses. Of course, it’s base spying, but I really believe it’s kept me alive. And this morning I saw you making effigies out of overcoats, on the terrace. And I was thrilled with the most delicious inquisitiveness. And then I caught young Emil. And then I found a dryad in a tree, and talked like a badly written fairy tale. When you are as young as I am, you’ll understand and forgive me, Miss Carmichael. It was so delightful to play a part that wasn’t the English master’s.”

“Yes, I know,” said Daphne, eager to show that she deserved these confidences. “Life would be dreadful if one didn’t play at things.”

“Then, to show me you forgive me, do tell me what you were playing at with your terrace effigies.”

She told—and “Oh,” she said, ending her tale, “it is so nice to talk to someone who understands. The others, you know, I just order them about. I wish you’d been one of the girls. We’d have been tremendous chums.”

“Indeed,” he said, “I think we should. And so the banquet’s to be held in the old grenier?”

“No—the room at the back of it, where the broken skylight is. I meant to sit in the bishop’s chair and wear a crown and be queen of the revels. I’m afraid you think it’s very silly, but one must do something besides lessons.”

“I know,” he said, “one must have the little bit of purple somehow.”

“Only the bishop’s throne is wedged under an old armoire, and we can’t move it.”

“I wonder if I could move it.”

“I could never get you there—unless I disguised you as one of the girls, and——”

“And I’m a little large for that? Yes. But if you give me leave I’ll go across the roofs and see what I can do. It’s quite easy. I wonder no one’s ever done it.”

“French boys can’t climb,” said Daphne. “Oh—if you would. But don’t bother. It doesn’t really matter, and if anyone caught you there’d be a frightful row.”

“I’m not afraid of that. I only wish I was coming to the party.”

“Oh, so do I,” cried Daphne; “but that’s just the sort of thing——”

“Just the sort of thing you don’t count as a fair adventure. Do you think I don’t know that? But if I had a sister at your school I’m sure I should make assignations with her at that skylight.”

“Have you a sister?”

“Born of poor but respectable parents,” he replied, “I have a father, a mother, and two sisters. I was educated in the usual way, and am by trade an overseer of woodmen and the like. Take my life’s simple story.”

“Then what on earth are you doing here? I beg your pardon.”

“Not at all, your friendly interest flatters me. My bosom friend was English master here. He was summoned to the bedside of an ailing relative. I took on his job for a few weeks, to keep the place warm for him. And here we are.”

“My stocks!” said Daphne, now quite at her ease, “that was jolly good of you.”

“Not a bit of it. I wanted to learn French—you heard for yourself this morning how much I’d learned. But why ‘your stocks’?”

“Oh”—her face took on a laughing crimson—“did I say that? I’m very sorry. It’s the way I swear. You have to swear somehow, you know.”

“Of course”—sympathetic.

“And I hate sapristi and mon Dieu, and the silly little French swears, and I don’t quite know my way among the English ones. So I get them out of an English gardening catalogue I’ve got.”

“And what do you say at your very angriest?”

“It’s awfully silly, isn’t it?—I say Helianthemum.”

“Very expressive, as you say it—but the e’s long, really.”

“Is it? I wish you hadn’t told me. But Plumbago’s a relieving word too. And you can’t pronounce that wrong if you try! And Dictamnus is good. Will you hand me down the bundles when I’m landed below? I ought to go now.”

“By the great Chrysanthemum, I protest—this is unfair,” he said. “You’ve got my whole biography, and I’ve nothing of yours.”

“There isn’t any of it! My mother died when I was small—and I came to school here—an uncle brought me—and my little sister Doris was brought over as soon as she was big enough. And here we’ve been ever since.”

“Then you don’t know your father at all?”

“No, I suppose he hates us—or else he’s for gotten ail about us. He’s always up to his ears in books. However, he’s just happened to remember that he had two daughters and he’s sent for us. We’re going home tomorrow.”

“What beastly hard luck,” he said, after a pause full of more than silence.

“I’m jolly glad we are going. At least I think I am,” she added with a truthfulness that put solidity into his repetition of his words, a truth that was before only in them as a shadow.

“What beastly hard luck. But I meant for me—not for you. Just when we’ve got to know each other. Are you really going?”

“By the nine-fifteen tomorrow. Our boxes are packed. But if you’re going to England I expect I shall see you there, sometime.”

“England’s a big place,” he said, rather ruefully. “What part of it are you going to?”

“London.”

“And I live in Falconhurst. So you see.”

“Well,” said Daphne, definitely, “good-bye. Thank you very much for everything. It was decent of you not to behave like a schoolmaster.”

“Don’t go,” he said feebly; “there are lots of things I want to tell you. How old are you?”

“I’m eighteen, but you oughtn’t to ask people their age.”

“I never do, except in trees,” he protested. “And I’m twenty-five—nearly twenty-six. By Jove—I mean forget-me-not—I wish you weren’t going!”

“If you think,” said Daphne, loftily, “that I should go on climbing up trees to tell you how young I am, you’re mistaken. It’s only because I knew I was going tomorrow that I’ve talked to you at all.”

“If that’s so,” he said, eagerly, “couldn’t we—mayn’t I—Look here, Miss Carmichael, it’s really most frightfully hard not to begin playing at fairy princesses again. There’s something about your eyes, or perhaps it’s the way your hair blows about. You’ll never see me again, as you say. Give me your hand. I won’t—I swear I won’t—I’ll only just hold it a minute and ask you to promise me something.”

Daphne gave her hand, at long arm’s length.

“Promise me,” he said, “that since I’m not to play at fairy princesses with you, no one else shall. For a year. Promise me that. I’ve no earthly right to ask it of you. And that’s why you’ll give me what I ask. You will, won’t you, my little-girl-princess?”

“No one else will ever want to,” said Daphne, because she could think of nothing else to say.

“Not want to? Don’t they allow looking-glasses in your convent?”

She said nothing. There really was nothing to say at all, now.

“Promise,” he said. His voice was very low, and almost rough.

“Oh, very well,” she said, and her voice, too, was low, and her laugh did not sound at all like a laugh, somehow.

“And I’m not to kiss your hand again, little princess?”

“No,” said Daphne firmly.

“It was unpardonable of me the last time,” he said, “but now—if you said I might—it would be different. Say I may—to seal the promise.”

“No,” said Daphne, automatically.

“Say yes—it’s such an easy word. Say yes, little blue-eyed princess. Say yes——” He suddenly, violently, flung away her hand. “Now go,” he said, “go now at once, do you hear? And remember—you’ve promised.”

When Daphne had reached the end of the allée défendue she found that she was trembling. And also—No, she was not crying. How could she be? There was nothing to cry about.

The bishop’s throne was in its right place at the end of the table—three long benches wedged tightly together, on which the feast was spread. There were little cakes of all kinds, gaufrettes and mille-feuilles and cream éclairs; there were petits suisses, cool and white, on green leaf-platters. There were French plums, and dragées, and sucre de pommes. There were also candied fruits, Mandarine oranges, pitchers of water and the sirop de groseille. And flowers, wall-flowers, daffodils, and double daisies from the girls’ gardens. Candles stuck up by the simple method of melting the ends and applying them to the table, stood all along its length. The final feast was for the little dormitory alone. The big dormitories had had this explained to them with chocolate arguments. The scouts were posted. The guests were dressed. Daphne was to go first, to light the candles and put the final touches. Doris, for the first time, was to be one of the revellers.

“Cover her face up as you carry her through the grenier,” Daphne whispered to Columbine; “say you don’t want her to catch cold. I don’t want her to be frightened of that great, dark, ugly place.”

She took her candle and went.

Miss Henney had gone to bed. The other mistresses were safe in their salon. The sixty-six girls who were not invited were softening their exclusion with chocolate. Old Claudine had been confided in, had contributed hard-boiled eggs and apples, and had promised to watch. A devoted and very stupid girl, bribed by a silver chain of Columbine’s, crouched on the stairs, ready to hand on the alarm if old Claudine gave it. The lucky six, dressed in costumes as gorgeous as the rifled trunks of the school afforded, stood in an expectant group in the door of the little dormitory.

“It’s my first real feast,” said Doris, yawning. “Oh, I am so happy. Does being happy make you sleepy, Colombe?”

“Yes, Miss Dormouse. But being happier wakes you up again. You wait a bit.”

“You never gave her your present,” said the child.

“No—you’re to do that. Tomorrow. In the train. Then she can’t give it back. And I shall give her something quite different from what I meant, it’s a great secret. I wouldn’t tell anyone but you. But you’re safe, aren’t you?”

“I am to be trusted to the death,” said Doris, sleepily. “What is it?”

“Only a pretty, pretty. I’d tell you in a minute only I think you’ll enjoy being surprised tomorrow when your eyes are wider open.”

“I am desolate that she departs, the dear Daphne,” Marie was saying; “she is so spiritual—so full of vivacity. Alas, what will school be, lacking its guardian angel?”

“She is indeed a strong spirit,” said Guilberte. “And pretty—pretty enough to bite,” sighed Madeleine. “Ah, what would I give to see her apparelled for her first ball of ceremony.”

“She makes you understand your lessons so well,” mourned Inez.

“She dressed my hand when I burned it,” said Madeleine.

“She taught me the new crochet stitch,” grieved Inez.

“She read to me when I hurt my foot,” snuffled Guilberte. Columbine sniffed. The waiting group was fast degenerating into a snivelling party.

Above, Daphne, in her white confirmation dress, with a blue blanket trailing behind her, and on her head a coronal twined of all Columbine’s chains, necklaces, and bracelets, squeezed between the wall and the ragged lath-ends and entered the banqueting hall, shading her candle with her hand from any possible draught.

She began to light the candles at the table’s lower end. Everything was as she had left it No, it wasn’t. As the candles sprang into flame something leaped to her eyes from the shadowy darkness at the table’s head—the bishop’s throne, with its ornate canopy, its gilding still bright in patches. He had climbed the roofs then, after all. Indeed he had; and here, set in front of the throne, in a green pottery jug, the most wonderful, branching, luxuriant bunch of white roses.

“Oh,” said Daphne, and stood. A sudden thought made her flutter the roses with quick eager fingers. Would there be a letter?—no, nothing. “Of course not,” she told herself. “I should have been very disappointed if there had been. How could he know that I should be the first person to find them?”