playmates in the wood, and she took prompt possession of his hand. As he
was leaving, he turned suddenly to Mrs. Root. "Why did you call her
Blanche?" he asked.

"She was so white and dainty, she just looked it."

Orth took the next train for London, and from Lord Teignmouth obtained
the address of the aunt who lived on the family traditions, and a
cordial note of introduction to her. He then spent an hour anticipating,
in a toy shop, the whims and pleasures of a child--an incident of
paternity which his book-children had not inspired. He bought the finest
doll, piano, French dishes, cooking apparatus, and playhouse in the
shop, and signed a check for thirty pounds with a sensation of positive
rapture. Then he took the train for Lancashire, where the Lady Mildred
Mortlake lived in another ancestral home.

Possibly there are few imaginative writers who have not a leaning,
secret or avowed, to the occult. The creative gift is in very close
relationship with the Great Force behind the universe; for aught we
know, may be an atom thereof. It is not strange, therefore, that the
lesser and closer of the unseen forces should send their vibrations to
it occasionally; or, at all events, that the imagination should incline
its ear to the most mysterious and picturesque of all beliefs. Orth
frankly dallied with the old dogma. He formulated no personal faith of
any sort, but his creative faculty, that ego within an ego, had made
more than one excursion into the invisible and brought back literary
treasure.

The Lady Mildred received with sweetness and warmth the generous
contributor to the family sieve, and listened with fluttering interest