under the folds of the wrapper knows it, and has gone there for refuge from a world that has no pity upon an unlicensed mongrel. Mamba has at last accomplished what she believes to be her final adjustment to the changing exigencies of life, and she has no complaint with Fate. The old room one flight up where Lissa was born, and from which Hagar was led to her banishment, is again her stronghold. But now how different in appearance! Papered with pictures of Lissa--Lissa at a steamer’s rail, off to Europe--Lissa smiling from the centre of a rotogravure page in the costume of her latest opera--Lissa in a hundred poses, a hundred settings. But Mamba, scorner of limitations, has at last learned the necessity of their acceptance, for only by so doing can she project her memory back into a past shared by her daughters. Across the way, where the muddy beach once lay, where the mosquito fleet was wont to dock, and where the negroes would swarm and chaffer; where the smacks, when they were sea-weary, would leave their bones awash in the warm tides, all is now quiet--barren--orderly. If she moves her gaze ever so slightly to the north it encounters the long line of a modern pier; to the south, and her happiness is ambushed by the spectacle of a dozen gleaming yachts belonging to rich Yankees who have invaded her familiar precincts. And so she has schooled her eyes to span the distance and dwell unimpeded upon a rectangle of sunny harbour. Beautiful, familiar, unchangeable, it lies as always mirroring the first dim fires of dawn or sparkling in the bright windy afternoons. And across it, as they used to do when Lissa was a baby, the New York steamers come and go, bellowing their deep hails and farewells. Over the hot roofs come the measured tones of St. Michael’s chimes announcing the hour of ten. From behind the pier sound shouts and commands. Mamba sits forward, tense, expectant. Then, majestically, across her rectangle of harbour moves the lofty cut-water of the New York steamer, folding back the flat blue into a thin green line lipped with white, drawing after it the steep, black wall of the hull, the high, gleaming superstructure. This is the moment for which Mamba has been waiting. Now that the vessel has drawn its full length into her sphere of vision she sees in it more than the form of a familiar friend out of a loved past. It is no longer a great and mysterious adventurer putting forth from her little world into a vast unknown. No. To-day she is watching a sure voyager of that fabulous distance which lies between the wish and the rainbow’s end--between her first fantastic dream for Lissa and the consummation of that dream.