was the child of your own inner imaginings--why that only makes it the more delightful to me. I simply gave it store-room in my memory before; I love it now--and at the same time I find I have quite forgotten it. There is a paradox for you!” Vestalia essayed a smile through her tears. “You are always kinder than even I expect you to be,” she faltered; “but I did tell you a--a story, and by rights you should be very angry with me.” David laughed. “Hans Christian Andersen told me many stories, but I worshipped him increasingly to the end. Dear lady, the stories are the only veritable things in life. The alleged realities of existence pass by us, or roll over us, and leave us colourless and empty. The genuine possessions of our souls--the things that shape and decorate and furnish our spiritual habitations--are the things that never happened. I note a twinkle in your eye. You fancy that I have said an inept thing. You think that I shall have to go back and explain that at least what has happened to us forms an exception to the rule. Ah, sweet little Vestalia, have you forgotten your own remark, here in this very room? ‘It isn’t like real life at all,’ you said; ‘it is the way things happen in fairy tales.’ I take my stand upon that definition. We have deliberately repudiated what are described as the realities of life. We discard them, cut them dead, decline to have anything whatever to do with them. We declare that it is fairyland that we are living in, and that we refuse to come out of it to the end of our days.” Vestalia gazed into his eyes with wistful tenderness. “To the end of our days!” she murmured softly, wonderingly. Then she recalled the task still unfinished. “I took the name of Peaussier,” she forced herself to continue, “because it was a translation of my own name. I looked in the dictionary, and found that it was the French for Skinner.” David lifted his brows. “You don’t mean----” he began, confusedly. “Yes;” she forestalled his question. “The old gentleman at the Savoy is my father’s own brother. My father was Abram Skinner. He was not a lucky man, or, in his later years, a very nice man either. He was always poor, and toward the end he was in other troubles too. My home was a thing to shudder at the recollection of. I ran away from it after mother died, and he’s gone, too, now. I changed the name, to wash my hands of the whole miserable thing. And then to think of the wonderful chance--to stumble upon my own uncle, a man of fortune and education, and the kindest heart alive--is it not the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in this world?”