“Madame said in her funny broken English, ’Ah, it is a beautiful thing to leave such memories behind one as Mademoiselle Joyce has left.’  I would have told her about the Road of the Loving Heart, but it is so hard for her to understand anything I say.  I think you began yours over here in France, long before Betty told us of the one in Samoa, or Eugenia gave us the rings to help us remember.

“We took Fidelia Sattawhite with us.  She is the girl I wrote to you about who was so rude to me, and who quarrelled so much with her brothers on shipboard.  I thought it would spoil everything to have her along, but mother insisted on my inviting her.  She feels sorry for her.  Fidelia acted very well until we went over to the Ciseaux place.  But when we got to the gate she stood and looked up at the scissors over it, and refused to go in.  Madame and mother both coaxed and coaxed her, but she was too queer for anything.  She wouldn’t move a step.  She just stood there in the road, saying, ’No’m, I won’t go in.  I don’t want to.  I’ll stay out here and wait for you.  No’m, nothing anybody can say can make me go in.’

“Down she sat on the grass as flat as Humpty Dumpty when he had his great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t have made her get up till she was ready.  We couldn’t understand why she should act so.  She told Betty that night that she was afraid to go through the gate.  She remembered that in the story where the old king and the brothers of Ethelried came riding up to the portal ’the scissors leaped from their place and snapped so angrily in their faces that they turned and fled.  Only those who belong to the kingdom of loving hearts could enter in.’  She told Betty that she knew she didn’t belong to that kingdom, for nobody loved her, and often she didn’t love anybody for days.  She was afraid to go through the gate for fear the scissors would leap down at her, and she would be so ashamed to be driven back before us all.  So she thought she would pretend that she didn’t want to go in.  She had believed every word of that fairy tale.

“We had a beautiful time in the garden.  We went down all the winding paths between the high laurel hedges where you used to walk, and almost got lost, they had so many unexpected twists and turns.  The old statues of Adam and Eve, grinning at each other across the fountain, are so funny.  We saw the salad beds with the great glass bells over them, and we climbed into the pear-tree and sat looking over the wall, wondering how you could have been homesick in such an interesting place.

“Berthe served tea in the pagoda, and because we asked about Gabriel’s music, Madame smiled and sent Berthe away with a message.  Pretty soon we heard his old accordeon playing away, out of sight in the coach-house, and then we knew what kind of music you had at the Noel fete.  Sort of wheezy, wasn’t it?  Still it sounded sweet, too, at that distance.