over half the world, wondering men of my race, and we are the wanderers of the world,-raising their faces for a glance about the heavens, will notice it. Unconsciously perhaps at first. But soon it will fall into its familiar place, a different familiar place for every one of them. Then they will remember that it is Christmas Eve, and that insignificant star will be like a lamp set in the windows of a home, leading their thoughts back to it. It is not a big star. But it is the star of my race, a fixed point for them in all their wanderings."

"I think," said Don Feliciano, "that it is a bigger star than it seemed at first. I must look at it again. And the sight of it makes you homesick? I do not wonder."

I laughed again. "Hardly homesick," said I. "Nowhere under that star but here is there a home for me to long for. But it makes me realize all at once what a derelict I am, drifting on through life."

"But you are not drifting any longer," Don Feliciano said gently. "You are anchored. And not use

less, surely, when you are giving me and all of us so much pleasure.'

"I fancy," said I a trifle bitterly, "that even if I had not come, Felici

dad would still be a rather pleasant place to live in. You surely were conscious of no void I came to fill." "Of course it is pleasant," said Don Feliciano simply. "But you have made it pleasanter."

"By letting you make a place for me in your lives," said I. "I have given you, perhaps, the pleasure that unselfish and generous natures gain from being kind. From your point of view that may be well enough. From mine it does not seem a lofty or necessary calling. It is merely one sign more that I am superfluous -except as a means whereby my friends may acquire merit by practising the virtues of Charity and Patience.

"And now," said I, laughing a little at the blackness of my mood, "you have acquired sufficient merit for one evening. Let's talk of something else. I suppose you are having a very great feast indeed at your house tomorrow?"

"All the godchildren I can scrape together by begging, borrowing, and stealing will be there," said Don Feliciano. "I tell their people that on Christmas Day the Church takes precedence. There is a place waiting for you, of course. I have decided to create you a godson in partibus, and so I claim full powers over you."

"If I am to be there," said I, “I think you will have to exercise your powers fully. Pedro feels that the dignity of my establishment requires me to give a state dinner to myself tomorrow. So while you are all making merry together, I shall be sitting in there alone, with half a dozen men behind me to watch me eat."

"Not at all," said Don Feliciano. "I shall not permit any such thing. on Christmas Day. I will attend to That is not the way one should dine

that."

"You don't know Pedro," I told "Besides, you him warningly. would be disappointing many people if you took me away. They have been planning this in the kitchen for a month. My cook has even spoken about it and I never heard him speak before."

"Well," Don Feliciano agreed regretfully, "I suppose I must let them have their way. They couldn't very well give their dinner without you to eat it, and so you see," he smiled, "that you are very useful and necessary, after all. Now I must be going on with Ceferina. If you cared to come to the Mass with

"We won't quarrel about the word," said he gravely. "I hope that you will wake tomorrow in better spirits. If you don't I shall have to take steps-"

"To evict me for dishonesty about my rent?"

"To see that you make up your arrears in full," he said. Suddenly, as he was leaving, he turned to me quite earnestly. "If I showed you that you are not-superfluous, as you call it, would you think me an old busybody?"

"It would be the greatest service you could do me,' I answered. "But I'm afraid that's beyond the power even of a fairy godfather, now that my eyes are opened."

"You have no notion how powerful I am," said Don Feliciano. "Good night now, and a Merry Christmas to you." And he went away and left me in the balcony, with the alien town spread at my feet and beyond it the one star that should have meant so much to me and which in fact meant-nothing.

While I watched the star, almost hidden by the palms, bells pealed out with insistent clamor. Through the tangle of greenery I saw the moving light of torches, as the people flocked to their church. They were one family, linked by innumerable ties of common need and faith and hope and service. Among them I had no place, save of their ready hospitality. I was an alien, standing idly by and looking on at the life of Felicidad and at the life of men. That night the House of Forgetfulness became a House of Remembrance.

"And this," thought I, "is Christmas Eve!" That was my reveillon.

CHAPTER XXIII

Christmas Gifts

It was Christmas Day.

The bells had rung out another joyous summons. The people had obeyed and gone streaming off to church, and my own people had gone with them, leaving me to hold the house. Not even one of my laundress's innumerable children was left to keep me company.

But before they went, I had a long chair carried out into the garden and established myself there. A touch of the slow fever hot lands breed was simmering in my blood. I was not sick by any means, but a great languor was on me.

Now it was mid-forenoon, and I was alone in the unwonted quiet of my domain.

Only the rags and tatters of the last night's blackness hung about me, for the air was so like spiced wine, and the clear winter's sunlight lay so warm on everything, that it was impossible to be depressed. Moreover, the fever, as slight fevers sometimes will, had keyed my body momentarily to its highest pitch of sensibility. Every nerve in me responded to the fantest calls from the outside. I seemed to be looking out once more through the undulled eyes of childhood. All the soft glow about me, every least sound and motion, was a marvelously new occurrence.

And then, seductively, the fancies which the house bred closed about me. Closer to me, surer than ever before, I felt that brooding, gentle companionship which the old, gray walls embodied. It seemed that I could almost see the fluttering of eager hands about the bars which hem the Void, as if She were striving to break through and share with me, visibly at last, the sunny quiet of her garden. I yielded myself to the mood willingly enough, having

just poise left to remind myself that it was revery.

All at once I started up. A voice had called my name.

Looking, I saw the garden and the vine-wreathed house as quiet as before. But coming down an aisle of shrubbery toward me was a woman,-such a woman as I knew the Lady of my house must be.

She was of a slender elegance of shape that made her seem quite tall, and she walked very easily. She was arrayed in all the quaint finery which a great lady in that land wears on a great occasion. The roundness of her arms and shouders and her bosom glowed warmly through gauzy draperies of black jusi. The sleeves of the camisa, and the panuelo, were wrought with the embroidery of untiring needles. Her skirt was of black silk. On it was painted a great spray of flowers, and it ended in a train. From under it slippers of black velvet stole in and out, like poor John Suckling's mice.

Over the lady's hair was thrown the soft lace of a black mantilla. In the midst of the somber richness of the dress, her youth glowed like a newly opened flower.

"Surely," I muttered, whimsically doubtful of my eyes and yet well pleased with them, "Felicidad is the greatest place in the world for vivid. dreams."

At the sound of my voice, the advancing lady halted. She seemed to hang swaying on her feet, as a blossom sways in a tiny breeze. In her hesitation she lifted a hand that fluttered in the sunlight above her head like a rosy moth.

I opened my eyes wide then, and sat up straight, and stared. "Upon “Upon my word," I said, "you might be Pepita of the Saints herself, the butterfly emerged from her chrysalis, the Princess of the East come into her own at last, and not a vision."

"Of course I am Pepita," the

vision said with a decidedness that left no doubt. "Who else could I be?"

"You might be the famous Dona Cinderella," said I, rising with what grandeur I could assume and bowing very low to her. "But since you are yourself, I will venture to ask you to sit down."

She laughed again, with the mischievous glee of a child. "Really you didn't know me at first?" she asked eagerly. "It surprised you? And you like to see me this way?"

"I like to see you any way. Come closer and let me indulge my liking. But I can only half believe yet that it's really you."

"But I assure you that it really is." She laughed up at me again, delightedly.

"Then," said I, "I humbly wish I had more eyes to look with. One pair doesn't let me see you fast enough to suit me. But tell me, how came your revered grandsire, the Grand Cham, to find you out after all these years, Dona Cinderella?

"In other words," I said, laughing at the blankness of her look, "will you explain the change? Did you find them growing on a tree, or have dressing you?" some mermaids spent their morning

"Oh, these?" she asked, referring to her clothes. "Don Feliciano gave me these. For my Christmas, het said. And he made me promise not to let Dona Ceferina see them till you had seen them first."

"The deuce he did!"

"I wondered myself," she said. "I didn't think he was afraid of her. And he sent me to show myself to you, and said that I must give you my greetings of the day and thank you again for saving my life."

"You have to be sent to do that?" "No," she said earnestly. "I went to the earliest Mass this morning, and I tried to thank you then.

But he told me to thank you again, and so I do.

"And he gave me a very funny message for you. I think he must have been joking with me, for he told me that I took his Christmas gift to you. But he didn't give me any gift to bring, and when I reminded him of it, he only smiled at me. So he must have been joking?"

"No," said I, comprehension of Don Feliciano's meaning coming to me, as I watched her unconscious face. "He was not joking. He meant that if you were bringing me what he hoped you brought, it would be the most beautiful and precious of all Christmas gifts. But have you brought it? doesn't know that, wise as he is. And I don't know it, nor do you, I think. And I don't dare to ask you, for fear you have or haven't. For if you had, how could I dare-"

He

She had been giving a quite impersonal attention to all this rigmarole. Now she told me quite decidedly that I was not well. "You must sit down again," she told me, "and be very quiet. You are tired." "Pepita," said I, laughing at the little quaver of anxiety in her voice, "you are wrong again. My poor head, this once at least, is straight as can be. I shall not go to sleep. But I will sit down if you like. All the more willingly because there's only the one chair out here. You'll have to sit at one end of it and look adorable, while I at the other end. sit and tell you how adorable you

by, she had been caring for me to her heart's content. She had pervaded the sleepy garden like a dryad on a holiday. Now she was running down some shadow-chequered aisle to pluck a blossom or a fruit for me; now stopping by my chair to fan me when I was too warm or lay a cover over me to ward a chill. No child with its first doll or hen of one chicken was ever more assidu

ous.

And while the forenoon was sliding by, I had lain there with the winter sunshine in my bones, and watched her. More than ever her face seemed like a flower, and no starlight was ever half as softly bright as that which danced in her eyes. In all the bright world, on that bright morning, she was the sweetest and most natural thing, glowing with life glowing with life and youth and radiating joy. And such a one as this had brought Don Feliciano's Christmas gift to me, perhaps,— and if I dared to take it.

At last she tired of her play. She sat down on the warm flags beside the chair and looked straight up at me with those dancing eyes of hers that could be so serious. "D-jon," she said suddenly, "I want to ask you a question. May I?"

"A hundred, if you like," I told her generously.

"But you'll answer it?" she asked, ever practical.

"I'll try to. What is the question?"

In that case I'll only think it."

Pepita touched the tips of cool fingers to my forehead in quite a professional way. 'It it very hot," she announced briefly. "Lie down here at once. I am going to take care of it for you."

I obeyed her.

"D-jon," said Pepita suddenly, "I want to ask you a question."

While the forenoon was sliding

took my hand. "Do you know," she said, separating my fingers with great great precision into two equal groups, "this is about the very pleasantest forenoon I ever had in all my life."

"I'll answer that question," said I, "by telling you it's quite the pleasantest I ever had.

"I think I'd like," she said, "ever

and ever so many forenoons just like this."

"I'd like them all like this," said I. "Is that the question?"

Then she asked it. "D-jon, do "D-jon, do you care so very much about being -rich ?"

"Not especially, I hope," said I. "But then I'm not so very-rich after all. Perhaps my attitude toward wealth is just plain sourgrapey."

"I think it would be lovely if you were very, very poor."

"That," said I, "is a uniquely charitable thought. Well, I've heard that it's rather difficult to throw off the burden of one's wealth. And I can't found libraries here, you know, and if I pensioned heroes I should only be pensioning myself, being the one accredited hero in Felicidad. But perhaps you have some solution to suggest?"

"I've thought about it a lot," said Pepita. "If you really want to do it, I've thought up a way. Have Pedro take all your money and things in a canoe, and carry them out beyond the Point, and drop them overboard. The water's very deep there."

"But I'd still own them, wouldn't I ?"

"What harm would that do you?" Pepita cried. "You couldn't get them, could you? You'd have to go and live in a tiny house. And you couldn't have all the servants you have now, and-and-"

"And what?" I prompted her, for she seemed preoccupied with trying to bring my thumb into symmetrical relations with its mates.

"Then," said Pepita very shyly, "you'd really need some one to take care of you.'

She glanced up at me, an instant only, but her eyes were wells of mute appeal.

"Poor Dona Cinderella!" I said softly. "Poor little disinherited princess restored to her kingdom for a day.

"Pepita," I said suddenly, "I want to ask you a question. May I?" She nodded her assent.

"Do you really care very much about being a muchacha?"

"Not so very much," she confessed. "I get tired of it. They are good to me, though," she added honestly, "and sometimes I feel more as if Don Feliciano were my godfather than my-master."

"They'd better be good to you," said I rather savagely, considering that I was speaking of gentle old Don Feliciano and his kindly wife. "Damn them," said I, still more savagely, "what right have they-"

One of my sudden resolutions took me in its grip.

"If you don't really care about being a muchacha, I've been thinking a good deal about it, and I've thought up thought up a way. You shall never be one again. Do you want to hear what the way is?"

She nodded again.

"You can come here to this house, and live here with me, and be-"

"And be your little sister, Brother D-jon?" The words came very softly from her lips.

"And be the mistress of the house." Even then a whimsical thought struck me. "Are you afraid of Pedro?" I asked very gravely.

She shook her head. "Why should any one be afraid of Pedro?" she demanded.

"You were just born for it!" I cried triumphantly. "That's all I can say. If you can ask that question, you were born to be the proud and haughty mistress of this house. Poor Pedro! Will you come?"

It was very quiet in the garden then. Only a few stupid bees broke the stillness of it, slaves of their task even on Christmas Day. The garden was steeped in quiet, and the empty house, and the wide emptiness of the sunlit air above us. "Will you come?"

Pepita only nodded, looking down.