to be secure."

The young man lifted a heavy casket from a table at his elbow. It
was of dark green imperial jade, with a wonderfully carved lid. He
took off the lid and picked up three small oddments of ivory--a
priest with a beard, a tiny soldier, and a draught-ox. Putting the
three in a triangle, he balanced the jade box on them.

"Look, Saskia! If you were living inside that box you would think
it very secure. You would note the thickness of the walls and the
hardness of the stone, and you would dream away in a peaceful green
dusk. But all the time it would be held up by trifles--brittle
trifles."

She shook her head. "You do not understand. You cannot understand.
We are a very old and strong people with roots deep, deep in the earth."

"Please God you are right," he said. "But, Saskia, you know that if
I can ever serve you, you have only to command me. Now I can do no
more for you than the mouse for the lion--at the beginning of the story.
But the story had an end, you remember, and some day it may be in my
power to help you. Promise to send for me."

The girl laughed merrily. "The King of Spain's daughter," she quoted,

"Came to visit me,
And all for the love
Of my little nut-tree."

The other laughed also, as a young man in the uniform of the