wants and tragedies, as the brutes and feathered stock that they
tended. It seemed to Elaine as if a musty store of old-world
children's books had been fetched down from some cobwebbed lumber-
room and brought to life. Sitting there in the little paddock,
grown thickly with tall weeds and rank grasses, and shadowed by the
weather-beaten old grey barn, listening to this chronicle of
wonderful things, half fanciful, half very real, she could scarcely
believe that a few miles away there was a garden-party in full
swing, with smart frocks and smart conversation, fashionable
refreshments and fashionable music, and a fevered undercurrent of
social strivings and snubbings. Did Vienna and the Balkan
Mountains and the Black Sea seem as remote and hard to believe in,
she wondered, to the man sitting by her side, who had discovered or
invented this wonderful fairyland? Was it a true and merciful
arrangement of fate and life that the things of the moment thrust
out the after-taste of the things that had been? Here was one who
had held much that was priceless in the hollow of his hand and lost
it all, and he was happy and absorbed and well-content with the
little wayside corner of the world into which he had crept. And
Elaine, who held so many desirable things in the hollow of her
hand, could not make up her mind to be even moderately happy. She
did not even know whether to take this hero of her childhood down
from his pedestal, or to place him on a higher one; on the whole
she was inclined to resent rather than approve the idea that ill-
health and misfortune could so completely subdue and tame an
erstwhile bold and roving spirit.

The mare was showing signs of delicately-hinted impatience; the
paddock, with its teasing insects and very indifferent grazing, had
not thrust out the image of her own comfortable well-foddered