PART I.--NETTA, THE MAKE-BELIEVER

Netta's father one day picked her up, swung her into the air, and put her down on the top of the high Italian cabinet in the hall. "There, you little slut," he said, "what does the world look like from up there?"

"Quite different; you wouldn't know it. The pictures look so queer--upside down; and the staircase isn't the same--or anything. Can't you come up too?"

"No; I'm afraid."

"Did you know there were two--no, three--big rings up here on the top of the cabinet? You can't see them from down below. May I bring them down?"

"If you like."

They were three disused wooden curtain rings, very dusty.

"How did they get there?" asked Netta.

"That," said her father, "is one of the things that I do not know; ask somebody else."

So she asked her mother, her governess, her nurse, and all the servants. They also did not know. They supposed that somebody must have put them there some time. Netta went back to her father and obtained permission to have those rings for her own. She carried them out into the garden into a secluded place under a weeping ash. There she examined the rings very carefully, and thought about the mystery which surrounded them. When she took them upstairs she showed them to her nurse.

"These are the magic rings," she said.

"Are they, indeed, now?" said the nurse, used to being interested, fictitiously, but at the shortest notice, in anything childish.

On the next day Netta felt the need of a temple. The romance of the rings was growing rapidly. Invested with a mysterious origin and properties not yet fully defined, but vaguely magical, they required to be enshrined in a temple. For one night they had put up with the shelter of the toy-cupboard. But in view of their character they were now to have a place apart. Netta went to her father and asked him if he had an empty box that he could spare.

"Would a cardboard box do?"

"Yes. It ought to be pure white, though."

The pure white cardboard box was found and given to her. This became the temple. Netta placed the three magic rings in it, and called her brother, who was a year older than she, and at that time rather a pious little prig.

"Would you like to see what's in that box, Jimmy?"

"I don't much mind."

"It's a temple, and I don't think I shall let you. I certainly shan't let _everybody_."

"You ought to let me see, because I'm your brother."

"Well, first of all I must write your name inside the lid. Everyone who is allowed to see into the temple is going to be written down there. You're not to look until I've done it." She wrote the name as neatly as she could with a long new pencil, beautifully pointed. "Now you can look," she said.

"It isn't anything at all. It's only three old rings."

"Yes, but they're magic rings."

"Pooh! They can't do anything."

"Can't they?" said Netta with immense indifference, as she replaced the