Page:The strange story book.djvu/221

 find. A sort of altar was next put together at the foot of a large maple from whose boughs hung wreaths of pink and white shells, while trails of ivy reaching from one tree to another formed an arcade. Empty birds' nests, chaplets of flowers and moss were soon added, and when the temple was done it seemed so lovely to the child that often she could hardly sleep at night for thinking of it.

It is needless to say all would have been spoilt for Aurore had the 'grown-ups' guessed at the existence of her precious temple or of Corambé. She took the greatest care to pick up her shells and the fallen birds' nests as if she really hardly knew what she was doing, and was thinking of something else all the time. Never did she enter the wood except when alone, and then from a direction different from that which she had taken before.

When the temple was ready, it was necessary to know what the sacrifice was to be. Nothing dead should be offered to Corambé. Of that she was certain. Then if no dead sacrifice was to be laid before him, why should he not become the champion and deliverer of living objects in danger of death? So Liset, a boy older than herself and her faithful follower, was ordered to catch birds and butterflies and even insects in the fields, and carry them to her, unhurt. What she was going to do with them, he neither knew nor cared, for Aurore had kept her secret well. Great would have been his surprise had he known that daily these captive swallows, redbreasts, chaffinches, or dragon-flies were borne tenderly to the altar of Corambé, and there set free. If one happened to perch for an instant on a branch above her head before disappearing into the blue, a thrill of ecstasy ran through the priestess.

But one day Liset, who had been sent to look for her, caught sight of her white frock as she was entering the wood. And with his words:

'Oh, ma'mselle, what a pretty little altar!' the spell of her story was broken, and it is a spell that can never be cast twice.

Aurore, however, did not always have dryads and cherubs and wonder-working spirits for company; Hippolyte would