Missy reached down and lifted Poppy to her lap. She adored Poppy;
but she couldn't help reflecting that a Skye terrier (though she had
never seen one) was a more distinguished kind of pet than a black
cat. A black cat was--well, bourgeois (the last rhyming with
"boys"). Airy fairy Lilian's pet was a Skye. It was named Fifine,
and was very frisky. Lilian, as she sat exchanging sprightly
badinage with her many admirers, was wont to sit with her hand perdu
beneath the silky Fifine in her lap.

"No, no, Fifine! Down, sir!" murmured Missy absently.

Poppy, otherwise immobile, blinked upward an inquiring gaze.

"Naughty Fifine! You MUST not kiss my fingers, sir!"

Poppy blinked again. Who might this invisible Fifine be? Her
mistress was conversing in a very strange manner; and the strangest
part of it was that she was looking straight into Poppy's own eyes.

Poppy didn't know it, but her name was no longer Poppylinda. It was
Fifine.

That night Missy went to bed in her own little room in Cherryvale;
but, strange as it may seem to you, she spent the hours till waking
far across the sea, in a manor-house in baronial England.

After that, for a considerable period, only the body, the husk of
her, resided in Cherryvale; the spirit, the pulsing part of her, was
in the land of her dreams. Events came and passed and left her
unmarked. Even the Evans elopement brought no thrill; the affair of