tell me something definite about her! You're perfectly maddening!"

The girl jumped lightly to the floor and slipped across the room to
swing the casement in the north wall and let me peer down into
Felicia's garden. If you'll look on the back of your envelope you can
see just how it was, just how the walls shut off the rectory yard.

"She's exactly twenty-seven," she sighed, "the most perfect age to be!
And if you were really going to tell her story you wouldn't have to go
back all the way to 1817, you'd begin it about--well, let me see--
you'd begin it about 1897, I think, and right down there in that wee
little garden. And of course you'd begin it with her whistling. And
you'd ask anybody you were trying to tell about her whether they'd
ever heard Mademoiselle Folly whistle--"

Did you? For if you have, I'm sure you've never forgotten the droll
way that Mademoiselle Folly stepped out upon a stage in her quaint
green frock and made her frightened curtsy. Can you recall her low
contralto drawl and her inevitable,

"Oh, my dears, I do _so_ hope that you're going to be good at
pretending! You all of you look as though you could pretend if you
just started! So let's you and I pretend that--"

Oh, I do so hope that you, too, are going "to be good at pretending"!
That you can make yourself pretend that it's twenty years ago and that
you're a nice invisible somebody standing down in a wee back yard of
Felicia's. From the garden you can't see the river because the walls
are too high. But now you're so close to them you see that they're
crumbly brick walls almost covered with vines and that at prim