it must be fatiguing."

"You find things simple, do you?" asked John Derringham, now
complacently roused to look at her. "What are your rules of life then,
let us hear, oh, Oracle!--we listen with respect!"

Halcyone reddened a little and a gleam grew in her wise eyes. She would
have refused to reply, but looking at her revered master, she saw that
he was awaiting her answer with an encouraging smile. So she thought a
second and then said calmly, measuring her words: "Things are what we
make them, they have no power in themselves; they are as inanimate as
this wood--" and she touched the table with her fine brown hand. "It is
we ourselves who give them activity. So it is our own faults if they are
bad--they could just as easily be good. Is not that simple enough?"

"An example, please, Goddess," demanded John Derringham with a cynical
smile.

"The dark is an example," she went on quietly. "People fill the dark
with their own frightening images and fear it because they themselves
have turned it into evil. The dark is as kind as the day."

John Derringham laughed. He was amused at this precocious wisdom and he
suddenly remembered that his old master had mentioned some clever child
when writing to him first about the place, two months before. This was
the creature, then, who was learning Greek. She had picked up these
ideas, of course, out of some book and was showing off. Children should
be snubbed and kept in their places:

"Then you don't cry when your nurse leaves you at night without a