Page:Burnett - Two Little Pilgrims' Progress A Story of the City Beautiful.djvu/116

104 been frightened. But they were not ordinary children, little as they were aware of that important factor in their young lives. They were awed for this first moment, but somehow they were fascinated as much as they were awed while they stood for a brief breathing space looking on. They did not know—no child of their age can possibly know such things of him or herself—that Nature had made them of the metal out of which she welds strong things and great ones. As they had not comprehended the restless sense of wrong and misery the careless, unlearning, and ungrowing life in Aunt Matilda's world filled them with, so they did not understand that because they had been born creatures who belong to the great moving, working, venturing world, they were not afraid of it, and felt their first young face-to-face encounter with it a thing which thrilled them with an exultant emotion they could not have explained.

"This is not Aunt Matilda's world," said Rob. "It—I believe it is ours, Meg; don't you? "

Meg was staring with entranced eyes at the passing multitude.

"‘More pilgrims are come to town,’" she said, quoting the Pilgrim's Progress with a far off look on her intense little black-browed face. "You remember