born, and then what an unfolding must have come to her of the joy that life holds for some people! I can fancy that "the mother of a little baby" was just the whole expression of the young girl Gabrielle. She had no other child for as long as the first Llewellyn lived, and that was ten years.

I wish I had a clearer notion of what the first Llewellyn was like. I have two pictures of him in my mind, drawn from talks with our grandmother. One is of a bright, impetuous little child flashing in and out amongst the trees and flowers of the sweet place-Colwyn had been sweet and orderly in Gabrielle's young days,-a child loving his child-mother with pretty clinging ways. Mammy's little sweetheart" was his pet name for himself. How often grandmother has told me that in drawing the baby - portraiture! In her most reasonable moods she recurs to him then; she even admits when she speaks thus that the young life may have been taken up higher that her boy did slip through the seen into the unseen during a storm which wrecked a little vessel off the Isle of Man some forty years ago. The second picture I have is of a delicatelooking lad, a schoolboy, but a mere child still (he had been taken away from her, so young Gabrielle complained, to be sent to school, and he hated leaving her)—a little lad clinging to his mother's knees one miserable afternoon, with his face buried in her lap, sobbing out his story to her; soiled and tired with a journey taken on foot, all alone-taken in fear of perils of many kinds, which he was explaining to her, telling her why he had run away and come to her for refuge-why he was obliged to come, why there was nothing else that he could do

when her.

they forced him away from "Who, grandmother?" I asked, when she drew this picture for me; and I know my face must have shown the indignation that I felt, because for the only time during our intercourse my grandmother kissed me. Little Llewellyn was sent back to school without being allowed to see his mother again. He had not remained there; either in strength or in weakness he took his life into his own hands a second time and ran off, but not again to his home, and it was that which broke his mother's heart and blurred her whole life. Her boy had wanted her and had not come to her. Her grief rose up continually against this fact, which stood out like a rock that waves break upon, and cannot wash away or hide. The child-he was only ten years old when all this happened-managed to get taken on board a little vessel at Carnarvon, which had been wrecked almost immediately after he joined her. The whole story was too sad a one for there to have been any record of it put upon the stone in the parish church

"Sacred to the memory of Llewellyn." The memory must be a dreadful one to the father too, we thought, Gladys and I, whenever we looked at the tablet on Sundays. Hot Sunday afternoons, when the light and heat came in at the open church door whilst the service was being wound up by the singing of the evening hymn, exactly as it used to be, no doubt, when the little drowned Llewellyn sat in his place in the family pew, and afterwards when the second Llewellyn sat there. The Colwyns will come to an end when grandfather dies, I often say to myself, and I am glad of it.

It was during the few months that intervened between the loss

of her little boy and the birth of the twins that grandmother's fancies began to show. She made up odd stories, Eleanor said. Grandmother herself thought that she then began to hear voices, to see visions, to receive messages, and to find out strange facts. I suppose both she and Eleanor were partly right. Then she was made a mother again-most miserable instead of most happy-and could not bear the touch of babyfingers upon her breasts.

This

was the crisis of her illness. She came out of it into a different life -into two lives, I should say which crossed one another.

The little white flag floating from grandmother's window - sill was a sign of the tipmost point of her madness. It seemed as if some fiend caught her up then and put her upon a pinnacle, just for the pleasure of throwing her down. It was her happiest, freeest, most reckless mood, when she believed that her little drowned boy had never been drowned at all, but had grown up and won his way in the world, and was coming home to his mother.

She heard the wind in the sails of his ship, a messenger had come to tell her of the day and hour of his arrival. She could almost persuade me of the truth of her story sometimes, it seemed so clear and sure to her. But the hour and the day passed, and grandmother climbed up to her attic rooms, and at night I used to fancy I heard the storm at sea, and the gurgling sound that water makes when it closes over something it takes for itself.

"You seem much better than you are, my dear," grandmother said to me once. I was drawing the outline of a yellow lily in the summer-house, and grandmother

me;

had sauntered in. Gladys was entertaining friends indoors that afternoon, and I had been listening vaguely to the sound of their talk, undecided whether I would join them or stay at my work. Gladys was too fond of having people about, I thought. It interrupted everything why should I go? Besides, nobody wanted I should not be missed. When next I looked up at the lily, after grandmother's speech, I saw that a large beetle had crept from the inside of the flower on to one of the petals. In my disgust and haste to get rid of the creature, I threw over the flower-vase and soaked my drawing. Grandmother was delighted at the little misadventure, and laughed the hard false laugh that always irritated Gladys. It had never jarred upon me so much as it did just then.

"Now perhaps you will go and pour out tea for your sister," my grandmother said. "I saw a picture of your heart this morning, Madeleine, and there was a black devil inside it." Was it true? Yes, it was true. I had been envying Gladys's beauty, not that morning only, alas!-but that grandmother should have known about it! How could she know? It was good for grandmother having us at Colwyn, I soon found out.

Her thoughts were occupied with us, she could talk freely to us, which relieved her so that her bad fits were less frequent; to me I should say she talked, for though grandmother worshipped Gladys, Gladys could not bear her pres

ence.

There was an old-fashioned cottage barometer in the entrance hall, with a quaint figure of a woman that went in or came out with change for rain and fair weather. I found our grand

the

mother studying it one day; little figure had just gone into the house and the door was shut. "So we may expect rain," I said, as I joined her. Then she looked up at me with the wistful helpless look that I had got to know as a sort of bridge between her moods. "Shut up alone," she said, "in a little house," and then she clenched

her hands, and wandered away from me.

"My life is like a faded leaf,

My harvest dwindled to a husk;
Truly my life is void and brief,
And tedious in the barren dusk.
My life is like a broken bowl,
A broken bowl that cannot hold
One drop of water for my soul,
Or cordial in the searching cold.”

In thought I draw a circle round Gladys's most beautiful day. It was the day on which we were told that we were to leave our old home. Looking at her that morning, I saw drawn together in her the beauty of her childhood, the charm she inherited from mother, and the breaking open of her own ripeness-a full-blown June rose, with morning dew upon the petals. It was her birthday, and she had been in the garden before I came down to breakfast, standing at the gate, my favourite dreaming place, which led from the garden into the meadow; some one had met her there, she told me afterwards.

have sent their sons to such an out-of-the-way place to be taught, I don't know. Perhaps Mr Treherne was a very learned man, or perhaps he charged little for teaching. His household attended our church on Sundays. Mr and Mrs and Miss Treherne sat in a pew by themselves, four or five slim boys in the next behind. Certainly we missed these last very much at holiday times. I recall the flat look the church had to me when, after kneeling before the service, I raised my eyes and saw the pew empty behind Mr and Mrs Treherne. Gladys was never taken aback as I used to be, having calculated beforehand when the first Sunday of the holidays would occur. "You silly," she used to whisper when she noticed my blank face. "Why, of course."

The ages of Mr Treherne's pupils ranged from twelve to fifteen. When I was about eleven years old-how funny it is to look back upon this!-I came out of church one Sunday a quite different person from the one I had been when

we went in. "I say, Madeleine," Gladys began saying to me on our way through the churchyard, "hasn't the new boy got a beautiful face? Don't you wonder what his name is?" At first her voice came to me like some one talking in a dream; but when I

understood what she said, I felt my face become covered with blushes, and I didn't know which way to look. For some time after, in talking to one another, we called Mr Treherne's new pupil "the boy with a beautiful face; but Gladys never rested until she found out his name. We both thought a great deal about him. I was in love with him; Gladys said she had taken a fancy to him. That was a poor sort of feeling for any one to have for my hero, it seemed to me. I never wanted to find out his name.

"God make thee good as thou art beautiful,'

Said Arthur when he dubbed him knight, and none

In so young youth was ever made a knight

Till Galahad."

That was how I spoke of him to myself.

"O Galahad! and O Galahad!" "the bright boy-knight !"—and one day I felt myself changed into the wan sweet maiden who wove her wealth of hair into a swordbelt, and bound it on him, and said that one should crown him king far in the Spiritual City, for I had been reading Tennyson's "Holy Grail," and fancied I understood snatches of it here and there. The Spiritual City was no doubt what we read of in the Revelation, only this Galahad's kingdom would not be a religious place, but a city of knights and ladies, and tournaments and love. For a whole term, I think, Sir Galahad was never out of my mind for a minute; but before the summer holidays we got to know him at a tennis - party.

The tennis-party was at our own place-mother gave two or three parties in July every year.

"And one there was among us ever moved in white,"

I murmured to myself, and then I looked out on the lawn from our bedroom window on the afternoon of our party day just before Gladys and I ran down to take our places beside mother. I saw Mrs and Miss Treherne in the garden and three pupils. They all wore white flannels, all three boys, it wasn't only Sir Galahad who was in white.

"Gladys," I said, stooping to tie a shoe-string, and hide my red cheeks, "can you believe that we shall really speak to Sir Galahad this very afternoon?"

Jim

Trelawny's his name, Trelawny, if you mean him," Gladys answered crossly.

We were really too young then to take part in the tennis; but visitors generally made a great deal of us to please our mother. So it happened that Gladys played in one game; Trelawny was her partner. As for me, I never once spoke to Sir Galahad, but I was near him many times, and I heard some of his talk with Gladys and with Miss Treherne, and with the other boys. I don't even now quite know how it was that I began to feel so cold in my heart. Thoughts are things I found out then from the way that little cupid of my brain shivered in dying through the hours of our tennis-party. He was dead before all our guests had left us, his little limbs stretched out, lying quite still, beautiful even then to look at, but too sad, so I covered him over, and my mind was left a blank calm. Did I create that joy and sorrow for myself, or had I been nourishing through the summer months one of the living love seeds that make the world, changing from form to form? Any way, Trelawny belonged to Gladys, and there wasn't any Sir Galahad.

We saw a good deal of Trelawny

after that for about a year, and then he went away, only coming now and then for short visits to the Trehernes, who were relations of his.

Oh

"Oh! I say, Madeleine," Gladys called out, stretching and turning herself from side to side on one of the bed-like sofas in the drawingroom at Colwyn "weren't we two sillies! Do you remember what we used to call him? 'The boy with a beautiful face.' dear, he is such a boy, so silly!" "Are you talking about Mr Trelawny, Gladys?" I asked, going on with a sketch I was trying to get by looking out of the window on a wet October afternoon. Gladys kicked with impatience. "You always were mad, you child!" she screamed at me. "Can't you put down that thing for a minute and listen? He's so silly, and I don't know what to say. Oh!" I came from the window then, and sat down by Gladys on a footstool, facing her. I saw that she had an open letter in her hand, which she was flapping up and down. "" May I look, dear?" I asked. Could that letter contain Gladys's first offer of marriage? The suggestion made my heart leap, and the colour come into my face, but Gladys was only just as rosy as usual, and she looked more annoyed than anything else.

you

Yes, you may read it, but won't understand that by itself," she said, and then she pulled a letter out of her pocket in a torn envelope, and gave me that as well. "Read that one first," Gladys said. Then she drew a cushion from under her head, and crushed it over her face, and didn't turn about or kick any more until I had finished reading letter No. 1.

"But oh, Gladys dear!" I exclaimed when I came to the con

cluding words-'Whatever answer you may send me, I shall never be able to give up loving you'— Gladys, why did you never tell me before? What a lovely letter!"

Lovely!" Gladys cried out, pulling the cushion down from her face. "Well, that one doesn't matter so much-read the other;" and so saying, she pulled the cushion up again over her face. From letter No. 2 I saw what Gladys's answer to No. 1 had been. I cried over letter No. 2, actually came to a little sob at the end. "Madeleine, what a flat you are!" Gladys was staring at me. "What is there to cry about? He's a donkey, that's all."

"Then what are you going to do now? You won't let him come at Christmas, if you mean to go on saying No?" I asked.

"It was all very well when we were kids," Gladys said. "He was quite grown up to us. But, oh dear me! he's such a boy to me now."

"I think he writes just like a man," I answered, "and he does not expect you to marry him yet." Marry-why, he's at College, child! Now, Madeleine, it's just this," said Gladys, sitting up on the sofa, "I can't love a boy."

"He loves you tremendously, Gladys."

"No, he doesn't; bless you, child, they all talk like that!" Gladys was an old hand at this sort of thing then, and there wasn't any romantic history going on; no first love-dream suddenly becoming real, nothing startling and beautiful and new.

This was the second autumn of our stay at Colwyn, and Gladys had been away on visits. She had paid visits at intervals more or less during all the time since we left our old home, some to friends of our early days, and