“Oh, well, I think it's very mean of you. You may go and sit on that pile of coats--the unpressed ones--and watch me work my poor fingers to the bone sewing on buttons until your hard heart softens and you come to a properer frame of mind.” Accordingly I sat down and contemplated, not without a certain grim satisfaction, the spectacle of a brown-and-gold fairy sentenced to honest labor. Shadows deepened in the room until she was almost in darkness. If the necessity of labor weighed upon her blithe spirit, she gave no evidence of it, for presently she began to hum to herself in a soft, crooning undertone, “speech half-asleep or song half-awake.” Clearer and clearer grew the melody, waxing to full awakeness, as the fresh and lovely young voice filled the room with the verse, one single line of which had dragged the Little Red Doctor's heart back across the unforgetting years:-- “The falling dew is cold and chill, And no bird sings in Arcady; The little fauns have left the hill; Even the tired daffodil Has closed its gilded doors, and still My lover comes not back to me.” The girlish voice trembled and stopped. The singer's hands fell into her lap. Her eyes dreamed. I think she must have forgotten, in the spell of music that she wove, the presence of an old man in the darkening room. I heard a soft, weary little catch of the breath, and then a name pronounced low and beseechingly, “Chris.” Now, this drama, as laid out by that romantic manageress the Bonnie Lassie, did not include music. The fairy song, I strongly suspect, was the interposition of the Higher Gods of Destiny. For the spell of it evolved and made real the past, and out of the past stepped the Little Red Doctor and stood trembling in the doorway of the ol'-clo' repository. “Who sang?” he gasped. I sat motionless. Neither the Bonnie Lassie nor the Higher Fates had assigned me a speaking part in the crisis. “Whose voice was that?” said the Little Red Doctor fearfully. “Am I hearing sounds that don't exist?” Out of the deepest of the shadows came the voice, broken, and thrilling. “Chris! Oh, Chris, is it really you?” “Ethel!” said the Little Red Doctor in a breathless cry. He stumbled halfway across the dim room, encountered a chair, and stopped. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. His voice had hardened suddenly to that of a cross-examiner. All the appealing and dramatic fiction which the Bonnie Lassie had carefully instilled into her subject for this crisis--the once rich and careless butterfly girl now brought low in the world and working for her precarious living--went by the board. “I--I-d-d-d-don't know,” stammered the brown-and-gold fairy. “You--don't--know,” he repeated. Then, vehemently; “You must know.” Silence from the dim corner. “Have you come back here to make my life wretched with longing again?” “No. Oh, no!” “Well? Why, then?”