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sun-dial set about with flowers. And as one played one loved . . . .
"
But--it's odd--there's a gap in my memory. I don't remember the
games we played. I never remembered. Afterwards, as a child, I
spent long hours trying, even with tears, to recall the form of that
happiness. I wanted to play it all over again--in my nursery--by
myself. No! All I remember is the happiness and two dear
playfellows who were most with me . . . . Then presently came a
sombre dark woman, with a grave, pale face and dreamy eyes, a
sombre woman wearing a soft long robe of pale purple, who carried
a book and beckoned and took me aside with her into a gallery above
a hall--though my playmates were loth to have me go, and ceased
their game and stood watching as I was carried away. 'Come back to
us!' they cried. 'Come back to us soon!' I looked up at her face,
but she heeded them not at all. Her face was very gentle and
grave. She took me to a seat in the gallery, and I stood beside
her, ready to look at her book as she opened it upon her knee. The
pages fell open. She pointed, and I looked, marvelling, for in the
living pages of that book I saw myself; it was a story about
myself, and in it were all the things that had happened to me since
ever I was born . . . .
"It was wonderful to me, because the pages of that book were
not pictures, you understand, but realities."
Wallace paused gravely--looked at me doubtfully.
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