Two Littir Pinarms’ Progress 155

“T don’t want it to be gradual,” she said anxiously.
“T want it to be sudden! It can be gradual after.”

She was an artist and an epicure in embryo, this
child. She tasted her joys with a delicate palate, and
lost no flavour of them. The rapture of yesterday
was intensified tenfold to-day, because she felt it
throbbing anew in this frail body beside her, in which
Nature had imprisoned a soul as full of longings as
her own, but not so full of power.

They took Ben by either hand and led him with .
the greatest care. He shut his eyes tight, and walked
between them. People who glanced at them, smiled,
recognising the time-honoured and familiar child-
trick. They did not know that this time it was
something more than that.

“The trouble is,’ Meg said in a low voice to Robin,
“T don’t know which is the most heavenly place to
stand. Sometimes I think it is at one end, and some-
times at the other, and sometimes at the side.”

They led their charge for some minutes indefinitely.
Sometimes they paused and looked about them, speak-
ing in undertones. Ben was rigidly faithful, and kept
his eyes shut. As they hesitated for a moment near
one of the buildings, a man who was descending the
steps looked in their direction, and his look was one of
recognition, It was the man who had watched them