It was not altogether a pretty story. Four years before, it began, when the brown-and-gold fairy must have been little more than a child. At a fashionable cottage place which is merely a glowing, newspaper-glorified name to Our Square, the Little Red Doctor, who had come down for a tennis tournament, had jumped off a pier after a small boy who had fallen in. He referred to it and to the brown-and-gold fairy's romantic view of it with tolerant contempt. “The _hee-ro_ business,” he said with the medical man's disdain of the more obvious forms of physical peril. “I run more real risks every day of my life.” However, a well-meaning but blundersome launch had broken his foot with its wheel, and the girl, who had seen the whole adventure, carried him off in her motor-car. Followed the usual discovery of friends in common, and by the time the crutches were discarded, the victim was hopelessly enslaved. Whether they were ever actually engaged or not did not clearly appear. The Little Red Doctor was carefully and gallantly defensive of her course. Nevertheless, knowing the Little Red Doctor as I do, I was resentfully sure that she had treated him shamefully. Finally there was an issue of principle between them. He alluded to it vaguely. “She didn't really care, of course,” he said. “Why should she? So I went away and knocked about the world for a bit. Then I came here because in Our Square there wouldn't be much chance of meeting her, you see. There's just one thing to do. Forget her. So I've forgotten her.” And the Little Red Doctor, taking the rose from the table where I had tossed it, held it cherishingly in his hands as if it were a human, beating heart. “Forget her.” Quite so! It was just and simple and sensible. Yet, while I agreed heartily, I had my private misgivings that it might not be so easy to forget a face with that particular quality of witchery about it, a witchery wholly distinct from mere beauty. I've known quite homely women to have it. Not that the brown-and-gold fairy was homely. But I cannot quite think that she was beautiful, either, by the standards of calm and balanced judgment. Only, the calmest judgment would be put to it to preserve its balance with those eyes turned upon it. She had an unbalancing personality, that brown-and-gold fairy, even to an old and rusty-fusty pedagogue like myself. In fact, she was quite unreasonably vivid to my thoughts for weeks after my one brief meeting with her. I believe that I was actually thinking about her and the Little Red Doctor, seated on my favorite bench in Our Square, on the August morning when a small, soft voice quite close behind me said:-- “Mr. Dominie.” I got up and turned around. There stood the brown-and-gold fairy. I frowned upon her severely. Not as severely as she doubtless deserved, considering how the Little Red Doctor had winced at the mention of her, but as severely as was practicable in the face of the way she was smiling at me.