Christina Alberta's father

§ 1

“THE scales,” said Mr. Preemby, “have fallen from my eyes.”

He had chosen a seat upon the Common which commanded an extensive view of the town, the town crowned by the green cupolas of the Opera House and lying as though the houses had been shot out of a cart down the long incline to the Pantiles. Beyond were the wide distances of the Kentish hill country, blue and remote.

Christina Alberta waited for more.

“This experience,” said Mr. Preemby, speaking with an occasional h’rrmp; “all these experiences—difficult to relate. Naturally I think you are of a sceptical disposition—taking after your dear mother. She was very sceptical. Of psychic phenomena in particular. She said it was Nonsense. And when your dear mother said a thing was Nonsense, then it was Nonsense. It only made things disagreeable if you argued it was anything else. As for myself—always the open mind. No dogma either way. I just refrained.”

“But, Daddy, have you been having psychic experiences? How could you have psychic experiences down here?”

“Let me tell you the story in due order. I want you to see it as I saw it—in due order.”

“How did it begin?”

Mr. Preemby held up a propitiatory hand. “Please! In my own way,” he said.

Christina Alberta bit her lips and scrutinized the tranquil resolution of his profile. There was no hurrying him; he had to tell his tale as he had prepared it.

“I do not think,” said Mr. Preemby, “that mine is a very credulous sort of mind. It is true I am not given to argument. I do not say very much. But I think and observe. I think and observe and I have a kind of gift for judging people. I do not think I am a very easy man to deceive.

“And it is to be noted that I started the whole affair. It began at my suggestion. I do not know what put it into my head, but I do know that it was me started the whole thing going.

“You know, after your departure our little band at the Petunia Boarding House was reduced to just six persons, not counting the young gentleman from Cambridge who was, as Miss Rewster says, a Bird of Passage. Naturally the six of us felt rather drawn together. There were the two Miss Solbés, both very intelligent young ladies, and there were Mr. Hockleby and Mrs. Hockleby, and Miss Hockleby, and there was me. We were drawn together at lunch after you had gone off—it was a little showery and we had a fire in the drawing-room and Miss Solbé, the one with the glasses, tried to show me one of her Patiences. We got into quite an interesting argument about whether it was possible to will which card would turn up next. I have always inclined to the view that for certain people, people with the necessary gift, it was possible to do so, but Mr. Hockleby showed himself extremely sceptical in the matter. He said that if there was a card on the top of the pack ready to turn up, and if one willed that a different card should turn up, then that meant that one had really by sheer will force to re-manufacture two of the cards in the pack, make them over again, each into the other, make them blank, reprint them and everything. But I tried to explain to him that this is not philosophically sound because of predestination. If you were predestined to will that such a card should be on the top of the pack, then that card was also predestined to be there. He argued——”

“But is it necessary to tell me all this, Daddy, before we get to your psychic experience?”

“It is just to illustrate the fact that Mr. Hockleby was an extremely sceptical person.”

“Was that young man from Cambridge present at the discussions?”

“No-oh. No. He was not. He had probably gone down to the Garage to see if his Spare Part had come. He was always going down to the Garage to see about his Spare Part.”

§ 2

Mr. Preemby h’rrmped and began a new section of his narrative.

“It was in the evening after dinner,” he said, “that things really began. I went into the smoking-room—to smoke—and afterwards I went into the drawing-room, and when I went into the drawing-room I had no more thought of occult phenomena, Christina Alberta, than I had of flying over the moon. But as I came into the drawing-room I saw Miss Solbé looking at her Patience cards which she had just put out, and the way she was holding her hands on the table reminded me of the way I had read that people put their hands together on the table when they were trying experiments in table-turning. And almost without thinking I said: ‘Why, Miss Solbé, the way you are holding your hands is just the way they do when they are going to do table-turning!’ I said it just like that.

“Mr. Hockleby was reading his paper at the time—the Times, I think, but it may have been the Morning Post—but he put it down when he heard me say that and he looked over his glasses at me and said, ‘You don’t believe in that sort of thing, Mr. Preemby, surely?’

“His wife was sitting with her back to me and from the way she spoke I think she must have been eating some sort of sweet or lozenge at the time. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘We did it at home dozens of times before I was married.’

“And I don’t know what put it into my head, Christina Alberta; it seemed almost as though it was something behind myself that did it, or it may have been a sort of antagonism I have always felt about that man Hockleby; but anyhow, I said, ‘I’d really like to try some of this table-turning.’

“The younger Miss Solbé, she’s really quite a charming young lady when you get to know her, and it seems she has been reading a little occult literature lately——”

“How old is she, Daddy?” asked Christina Alberta, regarding him with a look of novel suspicion.

“I don’t think she can be very much more than thirty-two or three. Thirty-four at the outside. And really quite well-read, quite well-read. Well, anyhow, she said she would like to try it. And Miss Hockleby, evidently she had been brought up on strictly sceptical lines by her father, she was curious too. So to cut a long story short, we tried it. Only Mr. Hockleby objected and Mrs. Hockleby overruled that. She was the only one among us who had ever seen anything of the sort before, and so it was she who arranged things and told us what to do. We chose a very solid table, the one that usually has the big aspidistra on it, and while we were turning out the light——”

“But why did you do that, Daddy?”

“One always does that,” said Mr. Preemby. “It makes the atmosphere more favourable. We lit a candle which Miss Margaret Rewster got for us and turned out all the electric lights; and while we were doing this, in came young Mr. Charles Fenton and said—what did he say? A peculiar expression. Ah, yes! ‘Gollys,’ he said, ‘what’s up?’”

“Was that the young man with the motor bicycle?”

“Yes. The young man from Cambridge. We explained what we were doing and asked him to join us. He declared he knew nothing of psychic phenomena, had never experimented with it at all and seemed very doubtful about taking part in the trial. ‘I don’t think there’s anything in it,’ he said. ‘We shall just waste our time.’ Indeed I remember now that he did go out intending to visit a music-hall, and then he came back and said it was raining. It’s very important to note that he was not at all eager to join us and that he was quite uninformed about occult things because, you see, as I will tell you, we found out presently that he was a person of exceptional psychic gifts, much greater psychic gifts than anyone else among us.

“Well, we arranged ourselves about the table in the usual manner, thumbs and little fingers touching, and for a time nothing seemed to happen at all. We found Miss Emily Rewster was peeping in through the slightly open door, and perhaps that may have had an unfavourable influence. I suppose she wondered what we were doing and why we had asked her sister for a candle. Then Mr. Fenton got very restive and grumbled to himself and said it was the silliest way of passing an evening he had ever tried. It was a little difficult to persuade him to keep silence and persevere. ‘All right,’ said he, with a kind of resentment. ‘Have it your own way.’ And then suddenly came two violent raps, raps like little pistol shots, not immediately under the table it was, but as if it was in the air a foot or so under the table. And then the table began to move. Slowly at first, shifting along the floor, and then quite strongly twisting and pushing up against our hands. It was very weird and impressive, Christina Alberta, very weird and impressive indeed. It rose nearly two feet I should think and then Mr. Hockleby broke the circle and it fell rather heavily, I fancy, and the leg hit his shin. He uttered an exclamation and stooped to rub his leg, and in the indistinct light he hit his head on the edge of the table. It seemed almost a judgment on his scepticism I thought. We turned up one or two of the lights to attend to him. ‘I don’t like this,’ said Mr. Fenton. ‘This is a bit too rum for me.’

“I asked him to try just once more.

“‘I don’t like this table riding up like this,’ he said. ‘It’s such a bad example for the chairs. Suppose some of them start playing cup and ball with us! You might get a nasty toss from a buck-jumping chair. And besides, it’s a lot too like a Channel crossing for my taste.’

“I think we were all a good deal excited by what had happened, and all the others, even Mr. Hockleby, were eager to continue.

“‘Next time I shall press down,’ he said. I think he was a little suspicious that either his wife or me had something to do with the phenomena. Evidently spiritualism was a long-standing dispute between him and his wife. His wife said she had seen tables move before, but none so actively as this one had done.

“Down we sat again. We had hardly waited a minute before the table began rocking about in the most extraordinary fashion, and then absolutely flew up so violently that the elder Miss Solbé was thrown back over that Ottoman there is there, and I was bumped under my chin. At the same time there was a perfect volley of cracks, like somebody cracking his fingers, but ever so much louder. It was quite a comfort to have the lights up again and see Mr. Hockleby holding the table down firmly in its proper place. ‘Damn you,’ he said—quite loudly. ‘Damn you. Keep down.’ Miss Hockleby and her father picked up Miss Solbé, who was on the floor in a sort of hysterical fit of laughter, with her feet waving about.

“‘I don’t like this,’ said Mr. Fenton. ‘It goes through one like an electric shock.’

“He spoke quite simply.

“The only one of us who had had any experience with occult phenomena was Mrs. Hockleby, and she had not done anything of the sort since her marriage to Mr. Hockleby five or six years before, because of his scepticism. She said now that it was very evident that some very strong and resolute spirit was present and was trying to communicate with us, and she explained a simple and safe method of getting into communication. We were to reform the circle round the table and we were to call over the alphabet, and when we came to the letter the spirit wanted there would be a rap and so we should be able to arrive at something definite. There is a sort of code quite well understood it seems in the spirit world, in which you convey ‘No’ by one rap and ‘Yes’ by two, and so on.

“We set to work at this,” said Mr. Preemby. “We asked if the spirit would like to spell out anything and it answered with two very loud raps, and then Mr. Hockleby read out the letters: A B C and so on. When it got to S the spirit gave a rap so loud it made me jump.”

“And what did you spell out, Daddy?”

“A name quite unknown to me then—SARGON, and then KING OF KINGS. We asked: was the spirit that was communicating with us Sargon? The answer came No. Was Sargon present? Yes. Then who was our communicant? OUJAH. Who was Oujah? WISE MAN. It was a very slow process spelling out the words in this way, and by the time we had got so far we were all very tired. Mr. Fenton in particular was very tired. He yawned and seemed greatly exhausted, and said at last he felt so weary and muzzy that he must go to bed. That was really very natural, because though none of us realized it at the time he was the actual medium under Oujah’s control. He went to bed and we tried to go on without him, but the magic had departed and we could not get so much as a rap. So we sat for a time talking all this over. Mr. Hockleby in particular was greatly flabbergasted, and then the rest of us went to bed.”

“Evidently Mr. Fenton made the raps,” said Christina Alberta.

“Evidently his presence was necessary for the raps to be made,” corrected Mr. Preemby. “Quite unconsciously he was a Mejum.”

There was a pause.

“Go on with the story,” said Christina Alberta.

§ 3

“The next evening was wet again, and as his Spare Part hadn’t come Mr. Fenton was able to join us once more. He made some little objection at first because he said he and his people were all Particular Baptists, and he was doubtful whether this sort of thing was not Necromancy and forbidden in the Bible. But I persuaded him out of that. And this time we spelt out a quite singular message. It was AWAKE, SARGON! ARISE OR BE FOREVER FALLEN!

“Even from the first I had had a feeling that those messages from Sargon had something to do with me. Now suddenly conviction came upon me. I asked ‘Is Sargon present?’ ‘Yes.’ I knew it would be so. ‘Is it anyone in the circle?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is it this gentleman?’—pointing to Mr. Hockleby. A very loud No. ‘Is it me?’ ‘Yes.’

“Mr. Hockleby I noted at the time looked annoyed—as though he felt it was he who ought to be Sargon.

“Then young Mr. Fenton stood up suddenly. ‘Oh! I can’t stand any more of this,’ he said. ‘My head feels quite muzzy. I’m sure this sort of thing is harmful.’ He walked across the room and sat down suddenly with his hands hanging over the arms of the chair—it was one of the big arm-chairs covered in cretonne. We all felt very much concerned, but as for myself I was all in a daze at the thought of being this Sargon and being called upon so openly to rouse myself to action. I did not understand fully as yet all that it meant to me, but I did realize that it meant a very great deal.”

“But what did you think it meant?” said Christina Alberta sharply, and her perplexed gaze searched his profile. His blue eyes stared at things far away beyond the distant hills, strange things, fantastic empires, secret cities, mystical traditions, and his brows were knit in the effort to keep his story together.

“All in good time,” said Mr. Preemby. “Let me tell my story in my own way. I was telling you, I think, that young Mr. Fenton said he felt heavy and strange. Mrs. Hockleby happily was quite equal to that situation. She had seen the same thing before. ‘Don’t struggle against it,’ she said. ‘Let yourself go. Just lean back in your chair. If you want to lie quiet, do. If you want to say anything, do. Let the influence work.’ And she turned to me and whispered ‘trance.’

“‘What is a trance?’ said Mr. Fenton—just like that. ‘What is a trance?’

“She began moving her hands in front of his face, ‘making passes,’ I think they call it. He shut his eyes, gave a sort of sigh and his head lolled back. We all sat round him waiting, and presently he began to mutter.

“At first it was just nonsense. ‘Oojah Woojer Boojer,’ words like that. Then more distinctly, ‘Oujah the Wise Man, Sargon’s servant. Oujah comes to serve Sargon. To awaken him.’ After that he seemed to wander off into sheer rubbish. ‘Why is a mouse when it spins?’ he whispered in his own voice and then, ‘That damned Spare Part.’

“Mrs. Hockleby said that was quite characteristic of this sort of trance, and then Mr. Hockleby got a writing-pad and a pencil to take down anything more that was said.

“And presently when Mr. Fenton spoke again, he did not speak in his own voice but in a kind of hoarse whisper quite different from his usual voice. It was the voice of this Oujah speaking—Oujah the control. With a slight accent—Sumerian I suppose.

“Well, the things he said were very astonishing indeed. I think that this Oujah was anxious to secure my attention by convincing me that he knew of things, intimate things that nobody else could know. At the same time he did not wish the others to know too clearly what he was aiming at. How did it go? What can I remember? Mr. Hockleby has a lot of it written down, but so far I have not had time to make a copy. ‘Child of the sea and the desert,’ he said, ‘the blue waters and the desert sand.’ Is it too fanciful to find an allusion to Sheringham in that? ‘Cascades and great waters and a thing like a wheel on a blue shield.’ That is more puzzling. But ‘cascades and great waters’ set me thinking of our big washers. And you remember the swastika on our blue delivery vans, Christina Alberta? Is not that oddly suggestive of a thing like a wheel on a blue shield? The Norse peoples called the swastika the fire-wheel. ‘Armies with their white garments fluttering, the long lines drawn out—armies of delivery.’ That again is queer. One is reminded of armies and also—don’t think me absurd!—of the drying-ground and the vans. It is like one thing becoming transparent and your seeing the other behind it.”

“Are you sure of the exact phrases, Daddy?”

“Mr. Hockleby has them written down. If I have not got them quite right you will be able to read his notes.”

“The swastika may be a coincidence,” said Christina Alberta. “Or you may have been drawing it on the edges of the newspaper. You do sometimes. And he may have seen it.”

“That does not account for the blue ground. He laid great stress on the blue ground. And there were other things; matters known only to me and your dear mother. I could not tell you them without telling you everything. And small things, entirely private to me. The name of my late grandfather at Diss. Munday his name was. It is sometimes difficult to argue about things although one may be absolutely convinced. And all this was mixed up with broken sentences about a great city and the two daughters of the western King and the Wise Man. And also he called me Belshazzar. Belshazzar seemed to drift in and out of his thoughts. ‘Come again to a world that has fallen into disorder.’ These are remarkable words. And then ‘Beware of women; they take the sceptre out of the hands of the king. But do they know how to rule? Ask Tutankhamen. Ask the ruins in the desert.’”

“Pah,” said Christina Alberta. “As though women have ever had a fair chance!”

“Well, anyhow, Mr. Hockleby has that written down.... And it seemed to me that this too applied to me, for because of my great fondness for your mother I had let so many years of my life slip away. He said many other things, Christina Alberta, richly suggestive things. But I have told you enough for you to understand what has happened. In the end Mr. Fenton came-to quite suddenly, much more suddenly than is usual in such cases, Mrs. Hockleby said. He sat up and yawned and rubbed his eyes. ‘Oh, Lord!’ he said, ‘what nonsense all this is! I’m going to bed.’

“We asked him if he felt exhausted. He said he was. ‘Absolutely fed up,’ were his actual words.

“We asked him if that was the end of his message.

“‘What message?’ he said. He had absolutely no memory of his communications at all. ‘Have I been talking?’ he asked. ‘This isn’t the sort of thing one ought to get up to. What sort of things have I been saying? Nothing objectionable I hope. If so I apologize. I mustn’t do any more of this sort of thing.’

“Mrs. Hockleby told him she had never met anyone with such a promise of great psychic power as he had, before. He said he was really very sorry to hear it. She said he owed it to himself to cultivate so rare and strange a gift, but he said That wouldn’t do for his people at all. The rain had stopped and he said he thought he would take a walk down to the Pantiles and back before turning in. Perfectly simple and natural he was from first to last, and rather unwilling. And he really did look tired out.”

“Didn’t he laugh once?” asked Christina Alberta.

“Why should he? He seemed a little afraid of what he had transmitted. The next day his Spare Part came. Mrs. Hockleby did her utmost to try to get him once more in the afternoon and develop his Communication, but he would not do so. He was full of questions about the ferry at Tilbury and the time of high tide. He would not even give us his name and address. When I spoke of sending Mr. Hockleby’s notes to the Occult Review he was suddenly quite alarmed. He said that if his name appeared in connection with them it might mean a very serious row with his family. He would not even allow us to put a Mr. F. from Cambridge. ‘Put quite another name,’ he said, ‘quite a different name. Put anything you like that does not point to me, a Mr. Walker, say, from London. Or something of that sort.’

“Of course there was nothing for us to do but agree.”

§ 4

“And that was the whole of your communication, Daddy?”

“It was only the beginning. Because after that I began to remember. I began to remember more and more.”

“Remember?”

“Things from my other lives. Memories stored up. This young Mr. Fenton was, so to speak, no more than the first cut in the curtain of forgetfulness that hung between this present life and all my previous existences. Now it was rent and torn open so that I could see things through it at a dozen points. Now I begin to realize what I really was and what I can really be....

“You know, Christina Alberta, I have never actually believed I was myself—not even as a schoolboy. And now it is interesting, I know and understand clearly that I am somebody else. I have always been somebody else.”

“But who do you believe you are, Daddy?”

“So far as I can gather I was first a chief called Porg in a city called Kleb in the very beginning of the world, æons and æons ago, and I tamed my people and taught them many things. Then afterwards I was this Sargon—Sargon the King of Kings. There is very little about him here in the Public Library, in the Encyclopædia Britannica; an upstart who took his name, my name, three thousand years later, an Assyrian fellow is the Sargon they tell about—he got mixed up with the Jews and he besieged Samaria—but I was the original Sargon long before there were Jews or anything of the sort, long before Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And afterwards I was Belshazzar, the last crown prince of the Babylonians, but that is not very clear. That remains obscure. Only one part of the record is lit—as yet. And possibly I have been other people. But the figure that stands out in my memory now is Sargon. It is his memories have been returning to me. It is he who has returned in me.”

“But Daddy, you don’t really believe all this?”

“Believe!—I know. Long before this Communication came to me I had had those intimations,—that assurance that I was somebody else. Now I see clearly. I can remember days in Akkadia now just as clearly as I can remember days in Woodford Wells. I could almost doubt whether I have ever lived at Woodford Wells; it seems so far away now. It was when I was in bed the night after Mr. Fenton had gone that these memories began to come. I was in bed, and then suddenly I was not in bed—I was reclining on a couch under a canopy, a canopy of pure white wool very finely woven and embroidered with emblems and symbols and suchlike things in golden thread, and I was upon my state barge upon the Euphrates. Two King’s daughters, sisters, with slender necks, not unlike the two Miss Solbés except that they were fairer—and decidedly younger—much younger—and clad rather more in accordance with the requirements of a warm climate, chiefly in woven gold—sat and fanned me with fans of Eagles’ feathers dyed a royal purple. And at my feet sat my councillor Prewm, who was oddly enough extremely like Mr. Hockleby—just the same iron-grey whiskers and with the same little tufts of hair over his ears. He was wearing an extremely tall cap of some black woollen substance, and he was making memoranda with a wooden style on a tablet of wet clay. It was like writing on a mud pie. And beyond him were the officers of the boat on a kind of bridge—they were wearing leather helmets studded with brass—and then one saw the rowers below, chained to their oars, and then on either side spread the broad brown river just crinkled by the breeze. The little boats fled to make way for us. They had coarse, square sails, and they lowered them and turned them about all in precisely the same way at precisely the same time. It was very pretty to see. Along the banks were little villages of mud-brick houses and clumps and lines of palm trees; and everywhere there were primitive contrivances, great bent poles of wood like giant fishing-rods, for raising water out of the river for the cultivation of the land. And the people were all crowded along the water’s edge and bowing with their hands and foreheads in the water and crying, ‘Sargon the Conqueror, Sargon, King of Kings!’”

“But Daddy, this was a dream?”

“How could I dream of things I had never seen nor heard of before?”

“One does.”

“One does not,” he replied with a quiet, invincible obstinacy. “I remember I was coming back from the South where I had given peace to a multitude of warring tribes, Elamites and Perrizites and Jebusites and people of that sort, and I was returning to my capital. I remember distinctly many details of the campaign and I know that with an effort I could recall more in the proper order. In dreams absurd things happen, dreams when you think them over afterwards are all at sixes and sevens, but this is all sane and orderly. One might think, Christina Alberta, that I had never dreamt dreams and that all these memories of that previous existence which crowd upon me now were a deception of my imagination! But I can go right back as if it was yesterday, and I am surer by far that I am Sargon than that I am Albert Edward Preemby your father. The former is my true self, the latter is just a very simple, unpretending wrapping that for some purpose, at present inexplicable to me, has hidden me from the world.”

He waved his hand with a bolder gesture than was habitual to him. He sat with his eyes wide open, looking at unseen things.

The girl regarded him for some seconds in silence. She was trying to grasp the full import of this amazing speech.

“And this was your Communication?” she said at last.

“You have to know,” he said. “You have to serve and help me.”

(Help him! How could she help him or herself? How far was this thing going? What was she to do?)

“Have you told anyone else of this, Daddy?” she asked abruptly. “Have you told anyone else?”

He turned his solemn little face towards her.

“Ah, there,” he said, “we have to be very discreet and careful—very careful indeed. Here and now is not the time to proclaim that Sargon, King of Kings, has come back to the civilization he did so much to found. One has to be careful, Christina Alberta. There is a spirit of opposition.

“For instance, I have told something of my first vision—dream you may call it if you like—to Mr. Hockleby. I described the resemblance between himself and Prewm. He was by no means pleased. His is a seditious, insubordinate nature. And besides—since then—I have recalled what happened—on the advice of Oujah—to Prewm....

“And I have realized since then that, though one may be convinced oneself, it does not follow that one will convince other people. It is true that Miss Hockleby and the two Miss Solbés have asked me to tell them more of my dreams—they too call them dreams. But their manner was curious rather than respectful and I have been extremely reserved with them.”

“That’s my wise Daddy,” said Christina Alberta, “You have to think of your dignity.”

“I have to think of my dignity, certainly. Nevertheless—” His hands went out in a new amplitude of gesture. “Here I am and this is my world. My world! I nursed it in its infancy. I taught it law and obedience. Here I am, the most ancient of monarchs. Rameses and Nebuchadnezzar, Greece and Rome, the Kingdoms and Empires, things of yesterday—interludes while I have been sleeping. And clearly I have been sleeping. And clearly I have not been sent back to the world without a mission. This is a great and crowded world now, Christina Alberta, but it is in a sad state of disorder. Even the newspapers remark upon it. People are not happy now. They are not happy as they were under my rule in Sumeria thousands of years ago. In the sunshine and abundance of Sumeria.”

“But what can you do, Daddy?”

“Dear Princess, my child, that I have to think out. Nothing hastily; nothing rashly.”

“No,” said Christina Alberta.

There came a pause. “One person only seems to have any belief in me. The younger Miss Solbé—— Did you say anything, dear?”

“No. Go on.”

“I have asked her if she too has had any dreams, any vague memories of a previous existence. She seems to have had something confirmatory in a shadowy sort of way. Very vague intimations. She tells them timidly, when her sister is not about. But she is under a misapprehension that her relationship to me was a particularly close and special one. She was not my Queen. There she is wrong. It is perhaps natural for her to think so, but I remember quite distinctly how it was. She was one of the Twenty Principal Concubines who carried the Eagle fans.”

“Have you told her that?”

“Not yet,” said Mr. Preemby. “Not yet. One has to go discreetly in all these things.”

Another pause followed. Christina Alberta looked at her wrist-watch. “My word!” she cried. “We shall be late for lunch!”

She noted as they walked back towards the Petunia Boarding House that his bearing and manner had undergone a subtle change. He seemed larger and taller and his face was serener and he held his head higher. He did not h’rrmp once. He seemed to expect people and things to get out of his way, and it was as if the path was a carpet that was being unrolled before his advance. Had she been able to see herself she would have remarked an equal change in her own carriage. The dance had gone out of her paces. She walked like one upon whose shoulders the responsibilities of life might easily become overwhelming.

They were late for lunch and all the other boarders were in their places, beginning. Every one turned to look at Mr. Preemby’s face as they came in, and then they glanced at one another. “So you’ve come back to us,” said Mrs. Hockleby to Christina Alberta, meeting her eye.

“It’s jolly to be back,” said Christina Alberta.