a spirited encounter between wits sharp and merciless, she had open approval. “That’s something like!” she would say. “Old Dumas” (or whoever it might be), “he can do it when he likes!” and the great one was patted on the back: “_This_ man’s going to live.” Bella had known that Mrs. Mar would sit in the half-light till even she could see no longer. But Hildegarde was not suffered to make her entrance in the dusk. Bella ran in first and “lit up.” She did not stop to draw the blinds, she was in too great a hurry; besides, it was nice to let in the mild and beautiful night. “Now, Hildegarde! Look, Mrs. Mar,” and Bella ushered in a living page from an old Icelandic Saga; “isn’t she glorious?” Mrs. Mar pecked at the regal figure with her hard, bright eyes, “White doesn’t make her any slimmer,” she said. “Oh, it wouldn’t do for Brunhild to be a mean, little, narrow creature.” “That helmet, too! It makes her look ten feet high.” “She wants to look high!—_and_ ‘mighty!’ and she does. No, no, stop Hildegarde, you _mustn’t_ take it off.” “Just till we hear the boys coming. It—it’s—” Hildegarde contracted her broad brows under the helmet’s weight. But Bella flew to the rescue. “Don’t, don’t! Hands off! What does it matter if it _is_ heavy? You must get used to it. You’ve got to be a heroine!” she wound up severely, “so don’t expect to be comfortable!” and Bella pulled a chair under the drop-light. “Sit here where Trenn and Harry can see you the minute they open the door. Now we can go on with the last dragon while we’re waiting.” Mrs. Mar cleared her throat, “‘Acte Cinquième. La Noce.’” And the two girls, raising their eyes from the work, saw through the open window, in front of them, not the close-massed syringa underneath, nor the soft Californian night above, but “une terrasse du palais d’Aragon,” in the town of Saragossa, four hundred years ago. And no sense visited them of any jarring contrast between the picture of the world in the yellow-backed book, and the picture of life as they knew it best. Thanks to the poet that lives in most young hearts, even Victor Hugo’s gallant vision of a civilization that was old before California was discovered, brought no envious sense of the difference between then and now—rather a naïve surprise that those others so far away, so long ago, should have understood so well.