Teddy, who had watched these doings with all his curiosity aroused, lost no time in hurrying down from the bedroom. In a lilac bush he found the lost paper. It was a letter, yellowed by age, charred with fire and written in a fine Italian hand--a woman’s. It read: _My dear Penny-Whistles, You don’t like me calling you Penny-Whistles, do you? You mustn’t be angry with me for laughing at your voice: I can laugh and still like you. But can I laugh and still marry you? That’s the question. I’m afraid my sense of humor----_ Teddy stopped. He realized that he was spying. He knew at last what Mr. Yaffon had been doing: burning up his dead regrets. The letter had already slipped from his hand, when the ivy behind him commenced to rustle. The top of a ladder appeared above the wall, followed by Mr. Yaffon’s head. It sounded as though the parrot had come to life. “Little boy,” he said, in his squeaky voice, “a very important letter has---- Ah, there it is. To be sure! Right at your feet, boy. Make yourself tall and I’ll lean down for it. There, we’ve managed it. Thank you.” When the head and the ladder had vanished, Teddy stood in the sunshine pondering. The spring was stirring. Everything was beginning afresh. Then he, too, lit a fire. When it was crackling merrily, he ran indoors to a cupboard. Standing on a chair, he dragged from a corner a box across whose lid was scrawled the one word MARRIAGE. Tucking it under his jacket, he escaped into the garden and rammed the box well down into the embers. As he watched it perish, he whispered to himself: “Silly kid--that’s what I was.” No doubt Mr. Yaffon was telling himself the same thing, only in different language. Then the child, on his side of the wall, strolled away to dream of pigeons; and the older child, on the other side, stooped above his flowers. CHAPTER XV--THE FAERY TALE BEGINS AGAIN The memories of a man are of the past. A child has no past; his memories are of the imagined future. His soul, in its haste for new experience, rushes on, outdistancing life. After his false awakening by Vashti, the world which Teddy annexed for himself was composed of sky and pigeons. Often as he watched his birds rise into the air, he would make his mind the companion of their flight. It seemed to him that his body was left behind and that the earth lay far below him, an unfolding carpet of dwarfed trees and houses as small as pebbles. By day his thoughts were of wings. By night, gazing from his bedroom window when the coast-line of the clouds had grown blurred, he would watch the Invincible Armada of the stars, plunging onward and ever onward through the heavens. The little he had learnt of life had pained him; so he took Mr. Sheerug’s advice and remade the world with a hobby. When the stars winked, he believed they were telling him that they knew that one day he would be great.