So intent was I on this enterprise that I quickly became oblivious of my surroundings. As a result, I was wholly unaware that someone else had crept stealthily into the room and tip-toed up behind me. All at once, my vision was shrouded in absolute blackness as a pair of dainty little hands slipped themselves around my eyes!

“Guess who!” trilled an angelic voice close by my left ear.

Owing entirely to the sheer unexpectedness of this intrusion, I half-started from my seat with a stifled shriek. It took only an instant, however, for me to grasp the reality of the situation. Settling back onto my chair, I sat panting for a moment, waiting for my racing heart to resume its normal rhythm.

“Let me see,” I finally breathed when the moisture had returned to my terror-parched mouth. “Could it be the fabled Helen, whose face, as the poet Marlowe wrote, ‘launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium’?”

“No, silly!” came the giggling response.

“Hmmm,” I muttered, tapping a forefinger against my lips. “Might it possibly be the legendary Queen Guinevere, whose beauty brought low the noblest realm in Christendom?”

“No!” squealed the delighted voice behind me.

“Well, then,” I sighed in a tone of exaggerated defeat. “I am at a loss to say just who it may be.”

“It’s me, Eddie!” exclaimed the cherubic being whose identity I had, of course, perceived from the very start of her delightful charade. Removing her hands from my face, she skipped around to the front of my chair. “Your dearest little Virginia!”

I emitted a chuckle and gazed fondly at the darling maiden whose features never failed to infuse my bosom with the deepest sentiments of tenderness and joy. Though of a somewhat diminutive stature for her twelve and a half years, there was an almost palpable air of vibrant health and youthful vivacity about her person—qualities that seemed particularly evident in the bewitching plumpness of her cheeks, arms, and torso. Her countenance was transfixing in each of its separate aspects—in the mischievous twinkle of her cerulean eyes—in the surpassing delicacy of her rosy little mouth—in the charming uptilt of her tiny nose—and in the lustrous texture of her dark brown hair, which she wore in that endearingly artless style commonly known as “pig-tails.”

As she stood before me—swaying her dear little body from side to side with her hands clasped behind her back—her gaze suddenly alighted upon the sheet of paper that lay across my lap. “What’s that, Eddie?” she inquired in her soft, slightly lisping voice. “A puzzle?”

“Of a sort,” I replied with an indulgent smile.

“Oooh, goody!” she exclaimed. “Let me see.” And with that, she took a quick step in my direction and snatched the paper from my lap.