“Rite,—­ah, that is it!  Rite what?”

“Rite!” said the child, authoritatively, bringing down her foot and shaking back her hair.

“And how old is Rite?”

“One, two, four, twenty.  Maman is twenty;—­Rite is twenty, too.”

“When was Rite four?”

“A great while ago.  She went to heaven in the afternoon,” was added, confidentially, after a moment’s inspection to see if he were worthy.

“Ah!  And what was there there?”

“Pitchtures, and music, and peoples, and a great house.”

“And where is Rite going now?”

“Going away in a ship.”

“Rite will have to wash her face first.”

But at this proposition the child flashed open her pale-blue orbs, half-closed them as a sleepy cat does, and, with no other change of countenance to mark her indignation, appeared to shut him out from her contemplation.  Directly afterward, she opened them again, bent forward and back over the swinging, and recommenced her song, as if there were not another person than herself within a hundred miles.  Half-hidden in the great hemlock-bough, this tiny, fantastic creature, so fair, so supercilious, seemed in her waywardness a veritable fay, mate for any of the little men in green, bibbers of dewdrops, lodgers in bean-blossoms, Green-Jacket, Red-Cap, and White-Owl’s-Feather.

Mr. Raleigh hesitated whether or not he should remain and watch her fade away into the twilight, wondered if she were bewitching him, then rubbed his hand across his eyes and said, in a disenchanted, matter-of-fact manner,—­

“Do you know your way home, child?” and obtained, of course, no reply.  For an instant he had half the mind to leave her to find it; but at once convicted of his absurdity, “Then I shall take you with me,” he said, making a step toward her,—­“because you are, or will be, lost.”

At the motion, she darted past and stood defiantly just out of his reach.  Mr. Raleigh attempted to seize her, but he might as easily have put his hand on a butterfly; she eluded him always when within his grasp, and led him such a dance up and down the forest-path as none other than a will-o’-the-wisp, it seemed, could have woven.  All at once a dark figure glided out from another alley and snatched the sprite into its arms.  It was a colored nurse, who poured out a torrent of broken French and English over the runaway, and made her acknowledgments to Mr. Raleigh in the same jargon.  As she turned to go, the child stretched her arms toward her late pursuer, making the nurse pause, and, putting up her little lips, touched with them his own; then, picturesque as ever, and thrown into relief by the scarlet sack, snowy turban, and sable skin of her bearer, she disappeared.  It is doubtful if in all his life Mr. Raleigh would ever receive a purer, sweeter kiss.