the rectory yard, laughing softly as she always laughs on choir practise nights. There was a certain bald dyspeptic choirmaster who was most irritable as he drilled his unruly boy choir and on warm evenings, when the oaken door under the heavy Gothic arches of the church was ajar, she could watch their garbed figures and wide opened mouths as they giggled over Gregorian chants under the swaying altar lights.

Once the tallest, naughtiest boy of all, the one with the cherubic "soprano" voice that was just threatening to break into piping uselessness, had climbed to the top of the wall and dropped his little black velvet cap at her feet.

"Get down from that wall!" the choirmaster had shouted.

Though the boy had ducked from view as suddenly as he had appeared he had managed to demand of the small person under the wall,

"Who are you, girl?"

She was holding the cap tightly while she answered,

"I don't know, 'zactly who I are--" when she heard the choirmaster shrieking,

"Dudley Hamilt! Come here at once!"

And though she watched every choir-practise night for ever so long she never caught another glimpse of the mischievous-eyed boy, a nasal- voiced woman sang in his stead and she never, never climbed walls.

But Felicia always waited patiently with the small black cap in her hands until a night when she summoned courage to call softly through the barred gate,

"Dudley! Dudley Hamilt!"

A fat boy ran to her and jeered,

"He's expelled! He can't come back till he's a tenor!"

So that's what you must pretend! That you can smile in the shadows of that moonlit garden, that you can smile at a dear little stupid who is waiting joyously for the time when Dudley Hamilt will come back a tenor!

CHAPTER I

IN THE BARRED GARDEN

She was a distinctly droll looking child at the age of seven, our little Felicia Day! With straight black hair brushed smoothly back and bound with a "circle comb," with short-waisted dresses that left her neck and arms bare. Her slender feet were encased in short white socks and low black slippers. And at her dear little feet was usually-- Babiche.

Babiche was so old that she whined at the evening chill; she perpetually teased to be taken back to her comfortable cushion at the foot of her mistress's bed. She was really very amusing when she sat up on her haunches and begged to be carried. For she was so fat that she hated to walk and she was a very spoiled doggy, that wee spaniel! A sort of a dowager queen of a doggy, a nice little old grandma lady of a dog.

The gentle yap-yap-yapping that could always be heard beyond the rear wall was from the throats of some score or more of her expensive great-great-great offspring who lived in the stable in tiny stalls with their pedigree cards tacked neatly under their elaborate kennel names.

It was a cross to Felice that she was not allowed to go through the small arched doorway at the back of the garden that led to the stable that opened on the narrow cobblestone "Tradespersons' Street." The Major didn't approve of the manners of Zeb Smathers the kennel man, or Zeb's wife Marthy, though he knew there wasn't a pair with their patience and skill to be found for miles around. All the same Felice adored the stable yard and would have dearly loved to climb the narrow stairs up to the low-ceilinged rooms above the stables where Marthy liked to sit.

Lean, grizzled old Marthy! There was usually a dog or two in her lap, either a sickly pup or a grieving-eyed mother dog whose babies had been taken away from her. Such tiny creatures, even the mother dogs-- those little Blenheim spaniels! Snub-nosed, round-headed with long silky flopping ears, soft curly coats and feathery tails. Felice liked the yellow and white ones, and always reached for them, but her grandfather coolly "weeded them out," as Zeb expressed it, because the Trenton ideal was a white dog marked with red.

Felicia knew when the dogs were going away. They always went the day after the Basket Man came with a pole tied full of oval gilded wicker hampers. Sometimes she, was allowed to stand in the gateway and watch them have their farewell bath, only of course she sniffed uncomfortably when Zeb let brown drops drip into the rinsing water from a fat bottle with a gay red skull and cross-bones on the label. "Scarbolic" was what she understood it to be, she mustn't touch it or she'd "go dead," whatever that was. But she forgot all about the smell as she watched the fluffy doggies drying in the sunny stable yard while Marthy sang vociferously to cheer her own drooping spirits; the silly old woman never could bear the days the dogs went away.

And so Felice on her side of the gate could listen rapturously to the throaty drone in which Marthy asked the world

"What's this dull town to me? Rob-in's not here--"

or warbled heavily

"Churry Ripe, Churry Ripe, Who'll buy my churries--"

or wailed

"Where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Where have you been, charming Billy?"

It almost made up for not being allowed to go out of the garden.

If Felice only could have been allowed to go around into the Tradespersons' Street just once! I wish she could have gone--just once! On one of the days when the swinging sign, that was gilded and painted so beautifully, was hung outside to announce

"KING CHARLES AND BLENHEIM SPANIELS For sale within."

I'm sure she would have loved the line of carriages waiting in the cobble-stoned alley when the fine ladies came to buy. I think she would have clapped her hands at the gay boxes of geraniums and the crisp white curtains in Marthy's shining windows over the stable door.

But she could only stay in the garden with the thin visaged old French woman who taught her to read and to write and to embroider and to play upon an old lute and to curtsy and to dance. One thing she learned that the French woman did not teach her--to whistle! She remembers answering the sea-gulls who mewed outside in the harbor and the sparrows who twittered in the ivy and the tiny pair of love-birds who dwelt in a cage at her mother's bedroom window. She learned to whistle without distorting her lips because her grandfather had forbidden her to whistle and if she held her mouth almost normal he couldn't tell when he looked out into the garden whether it was Felice or the birds who were twittering.

Her first memories of her mother were extremely vague. She remembers she was pretty and smiling and that most of the time she lay in a "sleighback" bed and that in the morning she would say,

"Go out into the garden and be happy," and that at twilight she would say, "You look as though you had been very happy in the garden--"

Sometimes Maman wasn't awake when Felicia came in from her long day in the garden. And the little girl always knew if her mother's door were closed that she must tiptoe softly so as not to disturb her. There was a reward for being quiet. In the niche of the stairway Felice would find a good-night gift--sometimes a cooky in a small basket or an apple or a flower,--something to make a little girl smile even if her mother was too tired or too ill to say good-night. She never clambered past the other niches that she didn't whimsically wish there was a Maman on every floor to leave something outside for her. So after a time the canny child began leaving things for herself, tucked slyly back where the housemaids wouldn't find them. She used to hide her silver mug with water at the very top stair because she was so thirsty from the climb.

She was always happy in Maman's room and in the garden but she had many unhappy times in that nursery. It was at the very top of the back of the house. From the barred windows under the carved brownstone copings she could peer out at the ships in the harbor and the shining green of Battery Park. The nursery had a fireplace just opposite the door that connected with the tiny room in which the old French woman slept. Both these rooms had been decorated with a landscape paper peopled with Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses and oft-repeated methodical groups of lambs. On the cold mornings she was bathed beside the fire--which she very much hated--and once when she was especially angry at the sharp dash of the bath sponge against her thin shoulders she clutched at the flabby dripping thing with all her might and sent it hurtling through the doorway where it splashed against the side wall of the tiny room and smudged out the flock of a simpering shepherdess. And instead of being sorry that she had obliterated the paper lambs she remembers shaking her fist at the discolored spot and shrieking "Nevaire come back, nevaire!"

Mademoiselle D'Ormy made her tell Maman. Mademoiselle's disapproval made it seem an admirable crime until Maman said ever se gently,

"I'm sorry you were unhappy!"

"_I was happy_," persisted Felicia, "I was proud, proud, proud when I threw it!"

"But you made Mademoiselle unhappy and you've made me unhappy--and you can't be truly happy, Felicia, when you're making some one else unhappy--"