”Puss Flanagan.” He looked disappointed, and said he didn’t remember the countess. How natural it was for the little courtier to give her a rank. He asked me where she lived.

“In East Har — ” I came to myself and stopped, a little confused; then I said, “Never mind, now; I’ll tell you some time.”

And might he see her?

Would I let him see her some day?

It was but a little thing to promise — thirteen hundred years or so — and he so eager; so I said Yes. But I sighed; I couldn’t help it. And yet there was no sense in sighing, for she wasn’t born yet. But that is the way we are made: we don’t reason, where we feel; we just feel.