think I couldn't bear it. Then last night--how shall I tell you how I
felt? I've comforted myself, before, with the dream that some day I
might get back to New York, to that little room at candle-lightin'
time, and find you again, and forget everything in all the world but
that you were there and I was with you, kneeling on the hearth-rug and
making toast for tea. And when I saw you, all white and silver
glitter, talking to the King--the dream was gone. There wasn't any
girl on the hearth-rug in New York; there was only another girl of the
kind that always makes me feel so strange, so ill at ease. It was only
night before last that I learned I am to go away again directly, to the
Far East, for the Government; and I was so happy, for I thought I'd go
the westward way and see you again in New York. Then, suddenly, I
realized that you were gone--not merely from New York, but from the
dream. And I was surprised into rudeness. That's all. But _please_
forgive me!"

"I told you I understood," said Mary Alice, "and in a way I did--not
that the--the dream as you call it meant so much to you, but that you
were disappointed to find Cinderella come out of her chimney corner and
talking to the King. I know that when we have a person definitely
placed in our minds, we don't like to have him bob up suddenly in quite
another quarter and in what seems like quite another character."

"Not if that person has been a kind of--of lode-star to you, and you
have been steering your course by--by her," he said.

Mary Alice flushed. "Now I think you ought to let _me_ tell," she
began, with downcast eyes. And so she told: how she had come there,
and how she had stayed, like the little mouse under the Queen's chair,
and how glad she was to have seen from a distance a little of this