"I remember," said Mrs. Stoddart, "being once nearly bored to extinction, not by an illness, but by my convalescence after it." "I have no time to be bored," said Annette, "even if there is no mantis and no lizard. Since I have been better so many things come crowding into my mind, that though I lie still all day I hardly have time to think of them all. The day is never long enough for me." There was a short silence. "I often wonder," said Annette slowly, "about _you_." "About me?" "Yes. Why you do everything for me as if I were your own child, and most of all why you never ask me any questions--why you never even hint to me that it is my duty to tell you about myself." Mrs. Stoddart's eyes dropped. Her heart began to beat violently. "When you took charge of me you knew nothing of me except evil." "I knew the one thing needful." "What do you mean?" "That you were in trouble." "For a long time," said Annette, "I have been wanting to tell you about myself, but I couldn't." "Don't tell me, if it distresses you." "Nothing distresses me now. The reason I could not was because for a long time I did not rightly know how things were, or who I was. And I saw everything distorted--horrible. It was as if I were too near, like being in a cage of hot iron, and beating against the bars first on one side and then on the other, till it seemed as if one went mad. You once read me, long ago, that poem of Verlaine's ending 'Et l'oubli d'ici-bas.' And I thought that was better than any of the promises in the Bible which you read sometimes. I used to say it over to myself like a kind of prayer: 'Et l'oubli d'ici-bas.' That would be heaven--at least, it would have been to me. But since I have got better everything has gone a long way off--like that island." And she pointed to the Grand Canary, lying like a cloud on the horizon. "I can bear to think about it and to look at it." "I understand that feeling. I have known it." "It does not burn me now. I thought it would always burn while I lived." "That is the worst of pain--that one thinks it will never lessen. But it does." "Yes, it lessens. And then one can attend to other things a little." And Annette told Mrs. Stoddart the long story of her life. For at twenty-two we have all long, long histories to unfold of our past, if we can find a sympathetic listener. It is only in middle age that we seem to have nothing of interest to communicate. Or is it only that we realize that when once the talisman of youth has slipped out of our hand, our part is to listen? Mrs. Stoddart certainly listened. She had been ready to do so for a long time. And Annette told her of her childhood spent in London under the charge of her three spinster aunts. Her mother, an Englishwoman, had been the only good-looking one of four sisters. In the thirties, after some disappointment, she had made a calamitous run-away marriage with a French courier.