It was true, in a measure, that Honora quickened to life everything she touched, and her arrival in Wayland Square was invariably greeted with shouts of joy.  There was no doll on which she had not bestowed a history, and by dint of her insistence their pasts clung to them with all the reality of a fate not by any means to be lived down.  If George rode the huge rocking-horse, he was Paul Revere, or some equally historic figure, and sometimes, to Edith’s terror, he was compelled to assume the role of Bluebeard, when Honora submitted to decapitation with a fortitude amounting to stoicism.  Hide and seek was altogether too tame for her, a stake of life and death, or imprisonment or treasure, being a necessity.  And many times was Edith extracted from the recesses of the cellar in a condition bordering on hysterics, the day ending tamely with a Bible story or a selection from “Little Women” read by Cousin Eleanor.

In autumn, and again in spring and early summer before the annual departure of the Hanbury family for the sea, the pleasant yard with its wide shade trees and its shrubbery was a land of enchantment threatened by a genie.  Black Bias, the family coachman, polishing the fat carriage horses in the stable yard, was the genie; and George the intrepid knight who, spurred by Honora, would dash in and pinch Bias in a part of his anatomy which the honest darky had never seen.  An ideal genie, for he could assume an astonishing fierceness at will.

“I’ll git you yit, Marse George!”

Had it not been for Honora, her cousins would have found the paradise in which they lived a commonplace spot, and indeed they never could realize its tremendous possibilities in her absence.  What would the Mediterranean Sea and its adjoining countries be to us unless the wanderings of Ulysses and AEneas had made them real?  And what would Cousin Eleanor’s yard have been without Honora?  Whatever there was of romance and folklore in Uncle Tom’s library Honora had extracted at an early age, and with astonishing ease had avoided that which was dry and uninteresting.  The result was a nomenclature for Aunt Eleanor’s yard, in which there was even a terra incognita wherefrom venturesome travellers never returned, but were transformed into wild beasts or monkeys.

Although they acknowledged her leadership, Edith and Mary were sorry for Honora, for they knew that if her father had lived she would have had a house and garden like theirs, only larger, and beside a blue sea where it was warm always.  Honora had told them so, and colour was lent to her assertions by the fact that their mother, when they repeated this to her, only smiled sadly, and brushed her eyes with her handkerchief.  She was even more beautiful when she did so, Edith told her,—­a remark which caused Mrs. Hanbury to scan her younger daughter closely; it smacked of Honora.