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from Beauty and the Beast, if you will, to the Three Wise Men and the Star, but a step a child’s mind distinguishes quite as quickly as ours;—superstition doesn’t come into the question at all.—What a bleak, ungarnished world you seem to inhabit, Hester.’

‘I’m not justifying my world to you,’ said Hester. ‘I’m only asking you not to take my child into the world of fairy-tales.’ She rose as she spoke. Clive and Ingpen were entering and Clive was saying, with a somewhat tightened utterance: ‘What about fairy-tales, Hester?’ He was glad to be done with Captain Ingpen.

Hester made no reply. She walked away to the fireplace and, again leaning her hands on the mantelshelf, smoked on, her back turned to them.

‘It’s only that Hester has been forbidding me to tell them to Robin,’ said Monica. She could not help it. It was the untamed girlhood in her and the impulse of vengeance flamed up as her anger had done. She smiled as she spoke, moving forward to the card-table and seeing reflected from Clive’s face how white and flashing was her own aspect. ‘They aren’t allowed to modern children, it seems.—Are you sorry you used to hear about Saint George and the Dragon and Puss in Boots, Clive? Do you