Megan had been one of those dazzlingly beautiful children whom people exclaim over as if they were deaf or insensible, so that even very young she had been aware, as children of royal blood or great wealth are aware, that she enjoyed some special privilege. And not alone from the exclamations of the careless but from the attitude of her parents did she divine this privilege. Her father would tear his eyes from the pages of a book to look at her; he treated her with an aloofness that had a touch of awe. Her mother's attempts to be severe, to discipline, broke down always into endearments, so that Megan lived with her in an excited atmosphere of fancied slights, sulks, tears, kisses and passionate admiration. Megan was privately considered by some older persons as a thoroughly detestable child whose parents, and indeed most of the world, spoiled beyond reason, and to these persons her screaming tantrums enjoyed an equal fame with her beauty, but to most people this beauty had its usual happy effect of minimizing her faults and enhancing her virtues. Scarcely any one could fail to be touched when so brightly lovely a child was willing to share her cake with another or tell the truth under stress. But as Megan grew older she began, by degrees but surely, to be a little less beautiful, until by the time she was well in her teens her beauty had left her entirely. This did not happen suddenly, and she herself was slow to realize it because the attitude of people toward her was so well established that it was slow to change. But it did change. And once she overheard some one say: "Yes, that is Davis' daughter now; you would never think she was such a ravishing child, would you?" Megan went home and saw in the glass the thin well-shaped body, the rather hollow-cheeked face of a handsome girl, a girl with some of that haggard Celtic look, together with the long upper lip, the rather blunted Celtic nose, the eyes greenish gray, brilliant and black-lashed, but she saw that of the intangible and extraordinary Celtic bloom nothing remained. She saw also that she had lost her kingdom.