It was the John Risca whom she had always known that spoke, the John Risca of whom Herold had occasional flashes, so that he could discount his usual gloomy petulance and love the essential man, the John Risca whose hand poor dumb, little Unity Blake had laid against her cheek--the best and purest John Risca, a will-o'-the-wisp gleam to all his nearest save Stellamaris; but to Stellamaris just the ordinary, commonplace, unaltering, and unalterable John Risca, the Great High Belovedest of her earliest memories. He had said things like this a hundred thousand times before. Yet now the colour rose once more into her cheeks, and a mist such as might surround a dewdrop veiled her eyes. “What makes you think I could do all that for you?” she asked. “I don't know, my dear,” said John. “You seem to belong to another world.” He stumbled. “You 're just a fairy sort of creature.” The answer did not satisfy the instinctive innermost whence sprang the question; but it served. Woman since the beginning of things has had to content herself with half-answers from man, seeing that she vouchsafes him scarcely any answers at all. She smiled and stretched out her hand. John took it in his clumsy fingers. It was whiter than any hand in the world, veined with the faintest of faint blue. “Anyhow,” she said, “you ought n't to have neglected the palace.” “What was I to do?” he asked whimsically. “You 've been so busy growing up that you've had no time to help me to run it.” “Oh!” she said. She withdrew her hand. “Oh, Belovedest, how can you say such a thing!” “You yourself,” laughed John, “asked whether it was months or years since we talked of it.” “I 've never stopped thinking about it,” she protested, and she went on protesting. But, like the Shakspearian lady, she protested too much. “You've grown up, Stellamaris,” said John. But how much of the old fairy-tale she still believed in he could not gauge. He went away, man with the muck-rake that he was, with the uncomfortable conviction that the roots of her child's faith survived.