Towards night the mystery was partly solved. It was the Shining Mother who found the connecting threads. She found the little, jagged locks of soft, sweet hair. The Ogre came upon her sitting on the floor among them, and the whiteness of her face terrified him. "I know--you need not tell me what has happened!" she said, scarcely above a whisper, as if in the presence of the dead. "A door in me has opened, and I see it all--_all_, I tell you! We have never had her,--and now, dear God in heaven, we have lost her!" It was very nearly so. They could hardly know then how near it came to being true. Link by link they came upon the little chain of pitiful proofs. They found all the little, sweet, white girl-clothes folded neatly by themselves and laid in a pile together, as if on an altar for sacrifice. If the Little Girl had written "Good-bye" in her childish scrawl upon them, the Shining Mother would not have better understood. So many things she was seeing beyond that open door. They found the Little Girl's dolls laid out like little, white-draped corpses in one of her bureau-drawers. The row of stolid little faces gazed up at them with the mystery of the Sphinx in all their glittering eyes. It was the Shining Mother who shut the drawer, but first she kissed the faces. After all, the Ogre discovered the last little link of the chain. He brought it home in his arms from the gardener's lodge, and laid it on the Little Girl's white bed. It was very still and pitiful and small. The took the gardener's little boy's best clothes off from it and put on the soft white night-gown of the Little Girl. Then, one on one side and one on the other, they kept their long hard vigil. It was night when the Little Girl opened her eyes, and the first thing they saw was the chairful of little girl-clothes the Shining Mother had set beside the bed. Then they saw the Shining Mother. Things came back to the Little Girl by slow degrees. But the look in the Shining Mother's face--that did not come back. That had never been there before. The Little Girl, in her wise, old way, understood that look, and gasped weakly with the joy and wonder of it. Oh, the joy! Oh, the wonder! "But I tried to be one," she whispered after a while, a little bewildered still. "I should have done it, if I hadn't died. I couldn't help that; I felt it coming on. Prob'ly, though, I shouldn't have made a very good one." The Shining Mother bent over and took the Little Girl in her arms. "Dear," she whispered, "it was the Boy that died. I am glad he died." So, though the Ogre and the Shining Mother had not found their Boy, the Little Girl had found a father and mother. Chapter VI The Lie