Virginia's voice rose in triumphant climax.

"That's all very fine in a fairy-tale, Virginia, and it is an extremely
good one for a little girl like you to make up out of her own head. But
you know in real life it is different." Margaret Elizabeth gazed
pensively into the fire.

Virginia, prone upon the hearth-rug, was disposed to argue what she did
not understand. "How different?"

"Well, in a fairy-tale you can have things as you want them, but in
real life you get tangled up in what other people want, and with duty
and common sense; and when you determine to follow your--" Margaret
Elizabeth was going to say "heart," but changed to "intuitions," "you
are left high and dry on a desert island."

Virginia was to be excused if she failed to make head or tail of this.
"I wish the Candy Man would come back," she remarked irrelevantly. "He
was much nicer than Tim. He liked fairy-tales. He said he was coming
some time."

"Oh, did he?" said Miss Bentley.

The reference to a desert island, and a disposition to quarrel with
fairy-tales, go to show that while she was decidedly more like herself
than in the last chapter, her recovery was not yet complete. In fact
Margaret Elizabeth was suffering from the irritability that so often
accompanies convalescence. Cantankerousness was Uncle Bob's word for it,
and he defended it with all the eloquence of which he was master, his