Page:Burnett - Two Little Pilgrims' Progress A Story of the City Beautiful.djvu/208

188 me stop to listen—when I heard you say that. An enchanted city!" he repeated pondering. "Lord, Lord!"

"Well," said Meg, with a little catch in her breath—"well, you know, John Holt, she's got to an enchanted city that won't vanish away; hasn't she? "

She did not say it with any sanctified little air. Out of their own loneliness and the Pilgrim's Progress and her ardent fancies, the place she and Robin had built to take refuge in was a very real thing. It had many modern improvements upon the vagueness of harps and crowns. There were good souls who might have been astounded and rather shocked by it, but they believed in it very implicitly, and found great comfort in their confidence in its joyfulness. They thought of themselves as walking about its streets exactly as rapturously as they walked about this earthly City Beautiful And because it was so real, there was a note in Meg's voice which gave John Holt a sudden touch of new feeling as he looked back at her.

"Do you suppose she is?" he said. "You believe in that, don't you—you believe in it?"

Meg looked a little troubled for a moment

Why," she said, "Rob and I talk to each other and invent things about it, just as we talked about