For three days Tania stayed alone in that cheerless room. She saw no one but an old, half-foolish man who came to her three times a day to bring her food. He gave Tania a few rough garments to dress herself in and treated the little prisoner kindly, but Tania found it was quite useless to ask the old man questions. She was a wise, silent child, with considerable knowledge of life, and she understood that there was nothing to be gained by talking to her jailer, who would now and then grin foolishly and tell her that she was to be good and everything would soon be all right. Her nice, kind brother was going to take her away to school as soon as he could. The wicked people who had been trying to steal her away from her own brother should never find her if her brother could help it. So the long nights passed and the longer days, and little Tania would have been very miserable indeed except for her fairies and her dreams. It is never possible to be unhappy all the time, if you own a dream world of your own. Still, Tania found it much harder to pretend things, now that she had tasted real happiness with her houseboat girls, than she had when she lived with old Sal. It wasn't much fun to play at being an enchanted princess when you knew what it was to feel like a really happy little girl. And no one would care to be taken away to the most wonderful castle in fairyland if she had to leave the darling houseboat and Madge and Miss Jenny Ann and the other girls behind. So all through the daylight Tania sat with her small, pale face pressed against the dirty window pane, waiting for Madge to come and find her. She even hoped that a stranger might walk along close enough to the house for her to call for aid. But a dreary rain set in and all the countryside near Tania's prison house looked desolate. More than anything Tania feared the return of Philip Holt. Once he got hold of her again, she knew he would fulfill his threats. During this dreadful time Tania had no human companion, but she was not like other children. She was part little girl and the rest of her an elf or a fay. The trees, the birds, and flowers were almost as real to her as human beings. For, until Madge and Eleanor had found her dancing on the New York City street corner, she had never had anybody to be kind to her, or whom she could love. Just outside Tania's window there was a tall old cedar tree. Its long arms reached quite up to her window sill, and when the wind blew it used to wave her its greetings. Inside the comfortable branches of the tree there was a regular apartment house of birds, the nests rising one above the other to the topmost limbs. Tania held long conversations with these birds in the mornings and in the late afternoons. She told them all her troubles, and how very much she would like to get away from the place where she was now staying. However, the birds were great gad-abouts during the day, and Tania could hardly blame them.