Page:Burnett - Two Little Pilgrims' Progress A Story of the City Beautiful.djvu/197

Rh exultation in it and no gloom at all. He had found something to distract him at last.

He liked to watch Meg's face as they went from one weirdly foreign place to another. Her eyes were immense with delight, and her face had the flush of an Indian peach. Once she stopped suddenly in such a glow of strange delight that her eyes were full of other brightness than the shining of her pleasure.

"Fairy stories do happen!" she said. "You have made one! It was a fairy story yesterday—but now—oh! just think how like a fairy king you are, and what you are giving to us! It will be enough to make stories of for ever!"

He laughed again. She found out in time that he often laughed—that short half laugh—when he was moved by something. He had had a rough sort of life, successful as it had been, and it was not easy for him to express all he felt.

"That's all right," he said. "That's just as it should be. But you are giving something to me too—you three."

And so they were, and it was not a little thing.

Their afternoon was a thing of which they could never have dreamed, and for which they could never have hoped. Before it was half over, they began to feel that not only John Holt was a prince, but that by