“You understand,” said the child. “I cannot put her on paper as I see her. I know but little of drawing, but I am always trying to draw faces--the faces of my own people--and trees, for they are my own people too; but I am never satisfied with my work. They do not get on the paper as they are in my mind.” “Why not have some instruction?” She shrugged her shoulders. The stranger understood, but in order not to seem to, he began to pick up some scattered leaves of paper near him. Seeing that they contained writing he was about to lay them down with an apology when the child said: “It is a letter I have written to Helen, the woman whose picture you have just been looking at. You may read it, only not aloud. I couldn’t stand that.” “But why should I read it at all?” he said. “It would be impertinent on my part. Besides, I am not afflicted with the despicable vice of curiosity.” “If you don’t mind, I wish you would read it,” she said. “It may help me. You will understand when you have finished.” But she looked ill at ease, nevertheless. The stranger read: MY DEARLY BELOVED HELEN:--Since you went away I am very lonely indeed. None other is so near and dear to me as you. I fill the hours with thoughts of you--thoughts so intense and absorbing that at times I actually see you by my side. But, alas! you do not stay when you come like that. You fade out of my sight; you go back to your world and I cannot follow you only with my thoughts, my dreams, my love and my letters. But I shall go and find you some day. I shall be one of the people of your world, and shall be busy with work which shall fill my time, my brain and my heart. I shall meet all my people there--my very own people, and shall love them and work with them and know loneliness no more. I have a story to tell you, Dear Heart. It is this: In a world nameless to all mankind, lived a woman, sweet and fair. It was a beautiful world. There the men were all true and the women all faithful. Misery was unknown and none sought happiness, for all possessed it. But this one woman dreamed dreams and saw visions. She heard voices calling to her from another world--a world whose people sought continually and vainly to attain a condition they knew only in name, and which they called Happiness. All believed in the existence of this condition and gave chase to it, each in his own way, but none found it. Often hearing the voices of these unhappy people and seeing them in visions, this woman longed to go and help them. The longing disturbed the harmony of life in all her world, until it was decreed that she must leave it and go to that other whose vibrations of anguish had shaken the spheres. But they did not tell her of her destiny. “She will know when she is there,” they said. So she slept, and the sleep was long in the eyes of the children of Time.