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Hours afterward, when she wakened—this time on her bed in her own room, whither she had been carried and undressed in that sound sleep—she found a radiant being perched upon a table beside her pillow.

Save for the presence of the doll herself, the child could never have believed but that the vision of last night was a dream. When later Uncle Hank explained to her, with her father’s assistance, that the beautiful Fort Worth doll had only been withheld from her the day before because it was a surprise, she accepted the explanation with a look and manner singular even for Hilda. There was something exultant in the seven-year-old’s bearing and in her thought. Her doll had a different origin from Maybelle Marchbanks’, or those that belonged to any other little girl in the world. Uncle Hank was not telling her the truth. It was not so, that her father had bought the doll. But her imaginative soul seized eagerly upon the spirit of the thing. All statements—and they were voluminous—concerning the importation and handling of Miss High Stepper (now Rose Marie) she understood to be figurative. This was not fact to which she was listening; it was poetry—parable; and she answered in parable of her own.