keeping her, but you may be sure she's all right.'

"Course she is," chorused the others, swinging their sticks light-heartedly. "Course she's all right."

"Get her for me, then," said mother. "I don't want to be silly and you're awfully good. But I must have her; I must have her. II want her."

The squire's sons turned as if on an order and went toward the wood. The curate lingered a moment. He was a huge youth, an athlete and a gentleman, and his hard, cleanshaven face could be kind and serious.

"We're sure to get her," he said, in lower tones. "And you must help us with your faith and courage. Can you?" Mother's hand tightened on that of Joyce.

"We are doing our best," she said, and smiled-she smiled! The curate nodded and went his way to the wood.

led them through the wood, strange ungainly mechanisms which a whiff of a scent could set in motion. A pinafore which Joan had worn at breakfast was served to them for an indication of the work they had to do; they snuffed at it languidly for some seconds. Then the colonel unleashed them.

They smelled round and about like any other dogs for a while, till one of them lifted his great head and uttered a long moaning cry. Then, noses down, the men running behind them, they set off across the ferns. Mother, still holding Joyce's hand, followed. The hounds made a straight line for the wood at the point at which Joan had entered it, slid in like frogs into water, while the men dodged and crashed after them. Joyce and mother came up with them at a place where the bushes stood back, enclosing a little quiet space of turf that lay open to the sky. The hounds were here, one lying down and scratching himself, the other nosing casually and clearly without interest about him. "Dash it all," the colonel was saying; "she can't-she simply can't have been kidnapped in a balloon."

A little later in the afternoon came Colonel Warden, the lord and master of all the police in the county, a gay, trim soldier whom the children knew and liked. With him, in his big automobile, were more policemen and a pair of queer liver-colored dogs, all baggy skin and bleary eyesblood-hounds! Joyce felt that this really must settle it. Actual living blood-hounds would be more than a match for Joan. Colonel Warden was sure of it too.

"Saves time," he was telling mother, in his high snappy voice. "Shows us which way she's gone, you know. Best hounds in the country, these two; never known 'em fail yet."

The dogs were limp and quiet as he

They tried the hounds again and again, always with the same result. They ran their line to the same spot unhesitatingly, and then gave up as though the scent went no further. Nothing could induce them to hunt beyond it.

"I can't understand this," said Colonel Warden, dragging at his mustache. "This is queer.' He stood glancing around him as though the shrubs and trees had suddenly become enemies.

The search was still going on when the

time came for Joyce to go to bed. It had spread from the wood across the fields, reinforced by scores of sturdy volunteers, and automobiles had puffed away to thread the mesh of little lanes that covered the country-side. Joyce found it all terribly exciting. Fear for Joan she felt not at all.

"I know inside myself," she told mother, ❝right down deep in the middle of me, that Joan's all right."

"Bless you, my chick," said poor mother. "I wish I could feel like that. Go to bed now, like a good girl."

There was discomfort in the sight of Joan's railed cot standing empty in the night nursery, but Joyce was tired and had scarcely begun to be touched by it before she was asleep. She had a notion that during the night mother came in more than once, and she had a vague dream, too, all about Joan and woodladies, of which she could not remember much when she woke up. Joan was always dressed first in the morning, being the younger of the pair, but now there was no Joan and nurse was very gentle

with Joyce and looked tired and as if she had been crying.

Mother was not to be seen that morning; she had been up all night, "till she broke down, poor thing," said nurse, and Joyce was bidden to amuse herself quietly in the nursery. But mother was about again at lunch-time when Joyce went down to the dining-room. She was very pale and her eyes looked black and deep, and somehow she seemed suddenly smaller and younger, more nearly Joyce's age, than ever before. They kissed each other and the child would have tried to comfort.

"No," said mother, shaking her head. "No, dear. Don't let's be sorry for each other yet. It would be like giving up hope. And we haven't done that, have we?'

"I haven't," said Joyce. "I know it's all right."

After lunch-again mother said she wouldn't be hungry till Joan came home. they went out together. There were no searches now in the wood and the gar

den was empty; the police had left no inch unscanned and they were away, combing the country-side and spreading terror among the tramps. The sun was strong upon the lawn and the smell of the roses was heavy on the air; across the hedge the land rolled away to clear perspectives of peace and beauty.

"Let's walk up and down," suggested mother. "Anything's better than sitting still. And don't talk, chick-not just now.' They paced the length of the lawn, from the cedar to the gate which led to the wood, perhaps a dozen times, hand in hand and in silence. It was while their backs were turned to the wood that they heard the gate click, and faced about to see who was coming. A blue-sleeved arm thrust the gate open and there advanced into the sunlight, coming forth from the shadow as from a doorway-Joan! Her round baby face, with the sleek brown hair over it, the massive infantile body, the sturdy bare legs, confronted them serenely. Mother uttered a deep sigh-it sounded like that-and in a moment she was kneeling on the ground with her arms round the baby.

"Joan, Joan," she said, over and over again. "My little, little baby!"

Joan struggled in her embrace till she got an arm free and then rubbed her eyes drowsily.

"Hallo!" she said.

"But where have you been?" cried mother. "Baby-girl, where have you been all this time?"

Joan made a motion of her head and her free arm toward the wood, the wood which had been searched a dozen times over like a pocket. "In there," she answered carelessly. "Wiv the wood-ladies. I'm hungry!"

"My darling!" said mother, and picked her up and carried her into the house.

In the dining-room, with mother at her side and Joyce opposite to her, Joan fell to her food in her customary workmanlike fashion, and between helpings answered questions in a fashion which only served to darken the mystery of her ab

sence.

"But there aren't any wood-ladies really, darling," remonstrated mother.

"There is," said Joan. "There's lots. They wanted to keep me but I wouldn't

stay. So I comed home, 'cause I was hungry." "But," began mother, "where did they take you to?" she asked.

"I don't know," said Joan. "The one what I went to speak to gave me her hand and tooked me to where there was more of them. It was a place in the wood wiv grass to sit on and bushes all round, and they gave me dead flowers to play wiv. Howwid old dead flowers!"

"Yes?" said mother. "What else?" "There was anuvver little girl there," went on Joan. "Not a wood-lady, but a girl like me, what they'd tooked from somewhere. She was wearing a greeny sort of dress like they was, and they wanted me to put one on too. But I wouldn't."

"Why wouldn't you?" asked Joyce. "'Cause I didn't want to be a woodlady," replied Joan.

"Listen to me, darling," said mother. "Didn't these people whom you call wood-ladies take you away out of the

wood? We searched the whole wood, you know, and you weren't there at all."

"I was," said Joan. "I was there all the time an' I heard Walter an' Jenks calling. I cocked a snook at them an' the wood-ladies laughed like leaves rustling."

"But where did you sleep last night?" "I didn't sleep," said Joan, grasping her spoon anew. "I'se very sleepy now.'

She was asleep as soon as they laid her in bed, and mother and Joyce looked at each other across her cot, above her rosy and unconscious face.

"God help us," said mother, in a whisper. "What is the truth of this?"

There was never any answer, any hint of a solution, save Joan's. And she, as soon as she discovered that her experiences amounted to an adventure, began to embroider them, and now she does not even know herself. She has reached the age of seven, and it is long since she has believed in anything so childish as woodladies.

W

HEN Maxime Taillandy, senior partner of the firm of Taillandy, Mason & Co., had settled himself comfortably in his bed to die he summoned to him Peter Mason, the son of the junior partner. Previously, devout Catholic that he was, he had summoned a priest. Peter was an American lawyer in his thirties whom the firm employed to extricate it from legal entanglements, both in New York and in Paris, for the company was international and not averse from making money on both sides of the Atlantic.

Maxime Taillandy, having lived honestly though successfully for threescore years and ten, was not afraid to die. If he regretted anything it was perhaps the fact that he was dying in the midst of the firm's most prosperous year; since the firm was to him as a babe to its motherit had been born of his brain and fed by his hands; he had tended it in its illnesses and had rejoiced in its health.

Thus it followed that his daughter, Marthe, although she kept his house and shared his meals, was almost a stranger to him, while Peter Mason, on the contrary, inasmuch as he was intimately connected with the firm and its fortunes, stood wellnigh as his son.

"Peter," said Taillandy, from his huge, canopied bed, "I have several things to say before I become silent forever. God has granted me a long life and a prosperous one, and a clear brain at the last. Also, I am dying at home and I shall breathe with my last breath the air of my beautiful France. For all this I am thankful. Nevertheless, few of us can leave this pleasant world without an anxious thought or two for the future of the persons and things that have been dear to us." The old man paused, and Peter, finding no reply, nodded sympathetically.

"Peter," Taillandy went on after a little, "I once had a son. You did not know

that, did you? Few do. He was not like me on the contrary, where I was black he was white, and where I was white he was black. Between us we could have made a chess-board of virtues and vices, and never have found ourselves on the same square. His virtues were his mother's-whom may the saints cherish in heaven! The poetry that she thought and dreamed he wrote down with pen and ink; the love of the beautiful that God deals sparingly to his creatures God gave in abundance to him. Tempestuous he was, yet gentle; self-indulgent, yet inspired. There-perhaps you have guessed his name. Six years ago it was one of the greatest in France."

Peter hesitated.

"Not Ferdinand Taillandy?" he said. "Himself," replied the old man.

Peter was not compelled to strain his memory, for, unbidden, the names of two great poems came to his lips and he uttered them aloud.

"Le Triomphe de l'Amour and Le Tombeau de l'Amour," he said.

"Yes," answered Taillandy, and his voice was full of bitterness; "they wellnigh tell a story, those two titles, do they not? What is this love but a serpent that we clasp to our breasts only to have it sting us? It was the usual tale; so commonplace that we have come to shrug and to smile when it is told us. He fell in love with a beautiful girl-ah, but she was beautiful, and gentle-and I think she loved him after her fashion. Her greatgrandfather had been brave with Bonaparte and had been made a baron. My son's great-grandfather, you see, was a peasant of Dijon and he, too, had fought under Bonaparte; but an Austrian had split his skull with a sabre at Austerlitz before the little Corsican could reward him. And so we are not of the nobility. Her parents opposed the match, for they were seeking more than my son had to offer. She gave him up without a struggle