VIII A HAPPY DOWNFALL

IX DOBSON SAVES THE DAY

X MISSY CANS THE COSMOS




CHAPTER I

THE FLAME DIVINE


Melissa came home from Sunday-school with a feeling she had never
had before. To be sure she was frequently discovering, these days,
feelings she had never had before. That was the marvellous reward of
having grown to be so old; she was ten, now, an advanced age--almost
grown up! She could look back, across the eons which separated her
from seven-years-old, and dimly re-vision, as a stranger, the little
girl who cried her first day in the Primary Grade. How absurd seemed
that bashful, timid, ignorant little silly! She knew nothing at all.
She still thought there was a Santa Claus!--would you believe that?
And, even at eight, she had lingering fancies of fairies dancing on
the flower-beds by moonlight, and talking in some mysterious
language with the flowers!

Now she was much wiser. She knew that fairies lived only in books
and pictures; that flowers could not actually converse. Well. . .
she almost knew. Sometimes, when she was all alone--out in the