The events in the life of Stella Blount which this chronicle will attempt to record did not take place when she was a child of twelve. But we meet her thus, at this age, ruling to a certain extent the lives of grown-up men and women by means of a charm, a mystery, a personality essentially gay and frank, yet, owing to the circumstances of her life, invested with a morbid, almost supernatural atmosphere. The trouble in the upper part of her spine, pronounced incurable by the faculty, compelled a position rigidly supine. Her bed, ingeniously castored, could be wheeled about the great room. Sometimes she lay enthroned in the centre; more often it was brought up close to one of the two windows, so that she could look out to sea and feed her fancy on the waves, and the ships passing up and down the Channel, and the white sea-gulls flashing their wings in mid air. But only this unvibrating movement was permitted. For all the splints and ambulance contrivances in the world, she could not be carried into another room, or into the pleasant, sloping garden of the Channel House, for a jar would have been fatal. The one room, full of air and sunlight and sweet odours and exquisite appointments, was the material kingdom in which she ruled with sweet autocracy; the welter of sea and sky was her kingdom, too, the gulls and spring and autumn flights of migratory birds were her subjects, the merchants and princes traversing the deep in ships, her tributaries. But this was a kingdom of Faerie, over which she ruled by the aid of Ariels and Nereids and other such elemental and intangible ministers. The latter had a continuous history, dreamy and romantic, episodes of which she would in rare moments relate to her Great High Belovedest and her Great High Favourite; but ordinarily the two young men were admitted only into the material kingdom, where, however, they bent the knee with curious humility. To them, all she seemed to have of human semblance was a pair of frail arms, a daintily curved neck, a haunting face, and a mass of dark hair encircling it on the pillow like a nimbus. The face was small, delicately featured, but the strong sea air maintained a tinge of colour in it; her mouth, made for smiles and kisses, justified in practice its formation; her eyes, large and round and of deepest brown, sometimes glowed with the laughter of the child, sometimes seemed to hold in their depths holy mysteries, gleams of things hidden and divine, unsealed revelations of another world, before which the two young men, each sensitive in his peculiar fashion, bowed their young and impressionable heads. When they came down to commonplace, it was her serene happiness that mystified them. She gave absolute acceptance to the conditions of her existence, as though no other conditions were desirable or acceptable. She was delicate joyousness just incarnate and no more--“the music from the hyacinth bell,” said Herold. In the early