humor of it and the tenderness and the naivete! Only a grown-up with
the heart of a child could really appreciate it."

"And you are that?" he asked, daringly. He knew she was not.

"Only for this half-hour," she smiled. "I may get critical at any
moment and entirely out of touch."

She did not, however, and watching her indulgent appreciation of the
little boys in Never Never Land, he unconsciously reflected that,
after all, this must be the real woman. That other personality, some
sudden disheartening side of which he got from time to time, was not
his new friend who laughed like a young girl over the crocodile with
the clock inside, and showed a sudden swift moisture in her brown eyes
when the actress pleaded for the dying fairy. When the curtain fell on
the last act, leaving Peter Pan alone with his twinkling fairy friends
in his little home high among the trees, Alice Stansbury turned to her
companion with the sudden change of expression he had learned to
dread. The pupils of her eyes were strangely dilated, and she was
evidently laboring under some suppressed excitement. She spoke to him
curtly and coolly.

"We'll have a Welsh rabbit somewhere," she said, "and then I'll go--
back." He was struck by this use of the word, and by the tone of her
voice as she said it. "Back," he repeated, mentally--"back to
something mighty unpleasant, I'll wager."

At the restaurant she ate nothing and said little. All the snap and
sparkle had gone out of the day and out of their companionship as
well. Even the music was mournful, as if in tacit sympathy, and the