“I believe things are really beginning to happen,” she said to herself.  “You need not pretend they are not, for they are,” she added, shaking her finger at the griffins with their provoking lack of expression.  “You wouldn’t make friends with anybody, not to save their lives, and it seemed as if I were never to get acquainted with a soul, when here I have met the magician in the most surprising way.  And to think I didn’t know him!”

The dream spirit was abroad in the garden.  Across the lawn the shadows made mysterious progress; the sunlight seemed sifted through an enchanted veil, and like the touch of fairy fingers was the summer breeze against Rosalind’s cheek, as with her head against the red pillow, she travelled for the first time in her life back into the past.

Back to the dear old library where two students worked, and where from the windows one could see the tiled roofs of the university.  Back to the world of dreams where dwelt that friendly host of story-book people, where only a few short weeks ago Friendship, too, with its winding shady streets and this same stately garden and the griffins, had belonged as truly as did the Forest where that other Rosalind, loveliest of all story people, wandered.

Friendship was no longer a dream, and Rosalind, her head against the red pillow, was beginning to think that dreams were best.

“If we choose, we may travel always in the Forest, where the birds sing and the sunlight sifts through the trees.”

These words of Cousin Louis’s in his introduction to the old story pleased Rosalind’s fancy.  She liked to shut her eyes and think of the Forest and the brave-hearted company gathered there, and always this brought before her the fair face of the miniature on her father’s desk and a faint, sweet memory of clasping arms.

When the doctor with a grave face had said that only rest and change of scene could restore Cousin Louis’s health, and when Rosalind understood that this must mean for her separation from both her dear companions, it was to the Forest she had turned.

“I’ll pretend I am banished like Rosalind in the story,” she had said, leaning against her father’s shoulder, as he looked over the proofs of “The Life of Shakespeare” on which Cousin Louis had worked too hard.  “Then I’ll know I am certain to find you sometime.”

Her father’s arm had drawn her close,—­she liked to recall it now, and how, when she added, “But I wish I had Celia and Touchstone to go with me,” he had answered, “You are certain to find pleasant people in the Forest of Arden, little girl.”  And putting aside the proofs, he had talked to her of her grandmother and the old town of Friendship.

She had been almost a week in Friendship now, and—­well, things were not altogether as she had pictured them.  Silver locks and lace caps, arm-chairs and some sort of fluffy knitting work, had been a part of her idea of a grandmother, and lo! her own grandmother was erect and slender, with not a thread of gray in her dark hair, nor a line in her handsome face.