Hetty raised her head from the arms crossed beneath it, and stared at the child. The light, filtered through the mass of scented color, freshened her complexion and rounded the outlines of her face; her solemn eyes looked upward; her hands lay together, like two lily petals, upon the coverlet. Unwittingly she was a living illustration of her father’s theory of the Reality of the Unseen. “No!” she answered quietly. “Not poetry, for it may easily come to pass that you should have a husband and home of your own. I do dream poems sometimes, if poetry is clouds and sunsets and music nobody else hears, and voices—and love words—and bosh!” Hetty could not help laughing. “Tell me some of the glory and the bosh! This is a beautiful confessional, Hester; I wish we had nothing to do for a week but to lie on the grass, and look at the blue sky through apple blossoms.” “Amen!” breathed her companion softly, and for a while they were so quiet that the robins, nesting upon the other side of the tree, began to whisper together. “Bosh and my poetry dreams are synonyms,” resumed Hester, her voice curiously mellowed from its accustomed sharpness. “Other people may say as much of theirs. I _know_ it of mine. There’s the difference. All the same they are as sweet as the poisoned honey we were reading about the other day, which the bees make from poppy fields. And while I suck it, I forget. My romance has no more foundation than the story of the Prince and the Little White Cat. Mine is a broken-backed cat, but she comes straight in my dreams after her head is cut off. You don’t suppose she minded _that_! She must have been so impatient when the Prince hesitated that she was tempted to grab his sword and saw through her own neck. You see she recollected what she had been. The woman’s soul was cooped up in the cat’s skin. And I was eight years old when the evil spell was laid upon _me_!” The tears in Hetty’s throat hindered response. Never until this instant, with all her love for her dependent charge, her knowledge of her sufferings, and the infinite pity these engendered, had the deprivations Hester’s affliction involved seemed so horribly, so atrociously cruel. The listener’s nails dug furrows in her palms, she set her teeth, and looking up to the unfeeling smile of the deaf and dumb heavens, she said something in her heart that would have left faint hope of her eternal weal in the orthodox mind of her brother-in-law. Hester was speaking again. “Every painter has his models. I have had mine. I dress each one up and work the wires to make him or her go through the motions—my motions, mind you! not theirs, poor puppets! When the dress gets shabby, or the limbs rickety, I throw them upon the rubbish heap, and look out for another.