'You don't mean to say,' I cried involuntarily, 'that you can find any excuses for her? I did not expect _you_ would take the baby's part!' 'But I did,' she confessed, with lowered eyes--'I _did_ take the baby's part--it was all my doing that Pepper was sent away--I have been sorry enough for it since!' It was her own story she had been telling at second-hand after all--and she was not Miss So-and-so! I had entirely forgotten the existence of any other members of the party but our two selves, but at the moment of this discovery--which was doubly painful--I was recalled by a general rustle to the fact that we were at a dinner-party, and that our hostess had just given the signal. As I rose and drew back my chair to allow my neighbour to pass, she raised her eyes for a moment and said almost meekly: 'I _was_ the baby, you see!' _MARJORY_ INTRODUCTION I have thought myself justified in printing the following narrative, found among the papers of my dead friend, Douglas Cameron, who left me discretion to deal with them as I saw fit. It was written indeed, as its opening words imply, rather for his own solace and relief than with the expectation that it would be read by any other. But, painful and intimate as it is in parts, I cannot think that any harm will be done by printing it now, with some necessary alterations in the names of the characters chiefly concerned. Before, however, leaving the story to speak for itself, I should like to state, in justice to my friend, that during the whole of my acquaintance with him, which began in our college days, I never saw anything to indicate the morbid timidity and weakness of character that seem to have marked him as a boy. Reserved he undoubtedly was, with a taste for solitude that made him shrink from the society of all but a small circle, and with a sensitive and shy nature which prevented him from doing himself complete justice; but he was very capable of holding his own on occasion, and in his disposition, as I knew it, there was no want of moral courage, nor any trace of effeminacy. How far he may have unconsciously exaggerated such failings in the revelation of his earlier self, or what the influence of such an experience as he relates may have done to strengthen the moral fibre, are points on which I can express no opinion, any more than I can pledge myself to the credibility of the supernatural element of his story. It may be that only in the boy's overwrought imagination, the innocent Child-spirit came back to complete the work of love and pity she had begun in life; but I know that he himself believed otherwise, and, truly, if those who leave us are permitted to return at all, it must be on some such errand as Marjory's.