outskirts of the village is still vacant, and the Colonel replies that
it is, at which unexpected but hoped-for answer I fall into a deep
swoon. When I awake the aged Colonel is bending over me, his long white
goat's beard tickling my chin."

(Mother Carey stops her darning now and Kathleen makes no pretence of
sewing; the story is fast approaching its climax,--everybody feels that,
including Peter, who hopes that he will be in it, in some guise or
other, before it ends.)

"'Art thou married, lady?' the aged one asks courteously, 'and if not,
wilt thou be mine?'"

"I tremble, because he does not seem to notice that he is eighty or
ninety and I but fifteen, yet I fear if I reject him too scornfully and
speedily the Yellow House will never be mine. 'Grant me a little time in
which to fit myself for this great honor,' I say modestly, and a mighty
good idea, too, that I got out of a book the other day; when suddenly,
as I gaze upward, my suitor's white hair turns to brown, his beard drops
off, his wrinkles disappear, and he stands before me a young Knight, in
full armor. 'Wilt go to the yellow castle with me, sweet lady?' he asks.
'_Wilt I_!' I cry in ecstasy, and we leap on the back of a charger
hitched to the Colonel's horseblock. We dash down the avenue of elms and
maples that line the village street, and we are at our journey's end
before the Knight has had time to explain to me that he was changed into
the guise of an old man by an evil sorcerer some years before, and could
never return to his own person until some one appeared who wished to
live in the yellow house, which is Beulah Castle.

"We approach the well-known spot and the little picket gate, and the