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“Gwen-do-lyn’!” It was a solemn and horrified warning.

Gwendolyn turned and walked slowly toward the window-seat. Her breast was heaving.

“Come back and sit in this chair,” bade the governess.

Gwendolyn paused, but did not turn.

“Shall I fetch you?”

“Can’t I even look out of the window?” burst forth Gwendolyn. “Oh, you—you—you—” (she yearned to say Snake-in-the—grass!—yet dared not) “you mean! mean!” Her voice rose to a scream.

Miss Royle stood up. “I see that you want to go to bed,” she declared.

The torrent of Gwendolyn’s anger and resentment surged and broke bounds. She pivoted, arms tossing, face aflame. There were those wicked words across the river that each night burned themselves upon the dark. She had never pronounced them aloud before; but—

“Starch!” she shrilled, stamping a foot, “Villa sites! Borax! Shirts!“

Miss Royle gave Thomas a worried stare. He, in turn, fixed her with a look of alarm. So much Gwendolyn saw before she flung herself down again, sobbing aloud, but tearlessly, her cheek upon the rug.

She heard Miss Royle rustle toward the school-room; heard Thomas close the door leading into the hall. There were times—the nursery had seen a few—when the trio found it well to let her severely alone.

Now only a hoarse lamenting broke the quiet.

It was an hour later when some one tapped on the school-room door—Miss French, doubtless, since it was her allotted time. The lamentations swelled then—and grew fainter only when the last foot-fall died away on the stairs. Then Gwendolyn slept.

Awakening, she lay and watched out through the upper panes of the front window. Across the square of serene blue framed by curtains and casing, small clouds were drifting—clouds dazzlingly white. She pretended the clouds were fat, snowy sheep that were passing one by one.

Thus had snowy flocks crossed above the trout-stream. Oh? where was that stream? the glade through which it flowed? the shingled cottage among the trees?

With all her heart Gwendolyn wished she were a butterfly.

Suddenly she sat up. She had found her way alone to the library. Why not put on hat and coat and go to Johnnie Blake’s?

She was at the door of the wardrobe before she remembered the kidnapers, and realized that she dared not walk out alone. But Potter liked the country. Besides, he knew the way. She decided to ask him to go with her—old and stooped though he was. Perhaps she would also take the pretty nurse-maid at the corner. And those who were left behind—Miss Royle and Thomas and Jane—would all be sorry when she was gone.

But let them fret! Let them weep, and wish her back! She—

That moment she caught sight of the photographs on the writing-desk. She stood still to look at them. As she looked, both pictured faces gradually dimmed. For tears had come at last—at the thought of leaving father and mother—quiet tears that flowed in erratic little S’s between gray eyes and trembling mouth.

How could she forsake them?

“Gwendolyn,” she half-whispered, “s’pose we just pu-play the Johnnie Blake Pretend … Oh, very well,”—this last with all of Miss Royle’s precise intonation.

The heavy brocade hangings were the forest trees. The piano was the mountain, richly inlaid. The table was the cottage, and she rolled it nearer the dull rose timber at the side window. The rug was the grassy, flowery glade; its border, the stream that threaded the glade. Beyond the stream twisted an unpaved and carefully polished road.

The first part of this particular Pretend was the drive to the village—carved and enameled, and paneled with woven cane. A hassock did duty for a runabout that had no top to shut out the sun-light, no windows to bar the fragrant air. In front of the hassock, a pillow did duty as a stout dappled pony.

Her father drove. And she sat beside him, holding on to the iron bar of the runabout seat with one hand, to a corner of his coat with the other; for not only were the turns sharp but the country road was uneven. The sun was just rising above the forest, and it warmed her little back. The fresh breeze caressed her cheeks into crimson, and swirled her hair about the down-sloping rim of her wreath-encircled hat. That breeze brought with it the perfume of opening flowers, the fragrance exhaled by the trees along the way, the essence of the damp ground stirred by hoof and wheel. Gwendolyn breathed through nostrils swelled to their widest.