I thought if only I could swim straight up one of them, as the motes did
in the sunshine, I should be sure to come in time to the place where my
mother was--the place where all the pretty white things came from--the
sunshine, the moonshine, the starshine, and the snow.

And there would be children to play with up there--hundreds of children
like myself, and all close at hand. I should not any longer have to sit
up aloft in the Red Tower with none to speak to me--all alone on the top
of a wall--just because I had a crimson patch sewn on my blue-corded
blouse, on my little white shirt, embroidered in red wool on each of my
warm winter wristlets, and staring out from the front of both my
stockings. It was a pretty enough pattern, too. Yet whenever one of the
children I so much longed to play with down on the paved roadway beneath
our tower caught sight of it he rose instantly out of the dust and hurled
oaths and ill-words at me--aye, and oftentimes other missiles that hurt
even worse--at a little lonely boy who was breaking his heart with loving
him up there on the tower.

"Come down and be killed, foul brood of the Red Axe!" the children cried.
And with that they ran as near as they dared, and spat on the wall of our
house, or at least on the little wooden panel which opened inward in the
great trebly spiked iron door of the Duke's court-yard.

But this night of the first home-coming of the Little Playmate I awoke
crying and fearful in the dead vast of the night, when all the other
children who would not speak to me were asleep. Then pulling on my
comfortable shoes of woollen list (for my father gave me all things to
make me warm, thinking me delicate of body), and drawing the many-patched
coverlet of the bed about me, I clambered up the stone stairway to the
very top of the tower in which I slept. The moon was broad, like one of