"I was never half so much in earnest! Please go on in the way you have begun. And have no fear that the charts will mislead you, or that the seas will grind your bark on hidden shoals. Shipwreck, you know, is one of the greatest joys of our adventures,--we have to be wrecked first before we find the island of the treasure-chests." She sighed softly, but I felt that her spirits were rising. "But those men down there? How shall I manage that?" she asked eagerly. I snapped my fingers. We must get back into the air again. And it was remarkable how readily my long-untried wings bore me upward. The earth, after all, does not bind us so fast! "I don't know the game; but I have found out a lot of things without being told, so tell me nothing! Remember that I have something quite remarkable, startling even, to show you to-morrow. I have even overcome, you know, the obstacle you placed in the way of my discoveries by sending in ahead of me this morning for the plans of the house." I watched her narrowly, but she was in no wise discomfited. "Well, I burned them the moment Hilda brought them back," she laughed. "I had faith in you, and I wanted you to manage it all for yourself. I rather guessed that you would go to Pepperton. That was when I still believed." "But you must go on believing. Make-believing is the main cornerstone and the keystone of the arch of the happy life." "You are sure you are not mocking a foolish old woman?" "You are the wisest woman I ever knew!" I asserted, and my heart was in the words. "I believe you have persuaded me; but Cecilia"-- She was again at the point of loosening her hold upon the cord that linked her shallop to Ariel's isle, but my own youth was resurgent in me. I rose hastily, the better to break the current of her thought. "Those men down there! They are in the hands of a higher fate than we control. I don't know the game"-- "But if"--she broke in. "But if you gave away the secret, explained it to me, you would throw me back into my darkest chimney to hope no more. Leave it to me; trust me; lean upon me! I assure you that all will be well." She bent her head and yielded herself to reverie for a moment. Then she sprang to her feet in that indescribably light, graceful way that erased at least fifty of her years from the reckoning, and was herself again. "Arnold Ames," she said, laughing a little but gazing up at me with unmistakable confidence and liking in her eyes, "we will go through with this to the end. And whether that slipper really fell at your feet in Beacon Street or in the even less likely precincts of Rittenhouse Square, or under the windows of the Spanish Embassy in Washington, I believe that you are my good knight, and that you will see me safely through this singular adventure." And I, Arnold Ames, but lately a student of chimneys, bent and kissed Miss Octavia's hand. [Illustration: And I bent and kissed Miss Octavia's hand.]