whereabouts, and of all that concerned her. If only she had trusted him more! If only---- With a start he roused himself, to realise that Christina's eyes were watching him with a certain shy wonder, and remembering that he had broken off his conversation almost in the middle of a sentence, he looked at her with a smile of apology. "Do please forgive me," he said. "Your mention of Biskra brought back so many pictures of the past, and--I was looking at them instead of going on with my story." "Baba likes pictures," the child murmured drowsily. "Perhaps Baba would like the picture I saw," her cousin answered, feeling an odd compulsion to speak of what was in his thoughts: "a picture of palm-trees, and a princess in a white gown, who walked amongst them, and----" "Was the princess like Christina?" Baba all at once pulled herself into an upright position on his knee, and looked earnestly into his face. "Tell Baba if that princess was like mine own pretty lady." The eyes of the two elders met, and Christina laughed confusedly. "Baba sees the people she loves through very rosy spectacles," she said, and Rupert smiled, whilst Baba's insistent voice repeated-- "Tell if the princess in the white frock was like Christina." "No, no--not at all like her," Rupert began, his eyes glancing at the bent dark head opposite to him, at the clear whiteness of the cheeks, into which the colour was flushing so becomingly; at the deep green of her eyes, the red line of her lips; "no, the princess was--at least," he broke off suddenly, and looked more narrowly at the girl. "How absurd!" he exclaimed, "and what an extraordinary hallucination. It shows what a power of imagination the least imaginative of us may possess; but at that moment, your princess and mine, little Baba, had a queer fantastic likeness to one another." Christina looked up at him sharply, surprise the predominating expression on her face. But before she could speak, Baba's clear tones again made themselves heard. "Just tell Baba 'zackly--'_zackly_ what the princess in the white frock was like; Baba wants to know." Again Rupert felt impelled to speak, almost against his own inclination, and his words came with a readiness, which, if he had considered the matter, would greatly have surprised him.