Page:Burnett - Two Little Pilgrims' Progress A Story of the City Beautiful.djvu/43

Rh pursued them with wild adventure; but perhaps the most satisfactory thing was to invent ways to spend it when it had grown to enormous proportions. Sometimes they bought a house in New York, and lived there together; sometimes they travelled in foreign lands with it; sometimes they bought land which increased in value to such an extent that they were millionaires in a month. Ah, it was a Treasure indeed!

After the little, low, overstrained laugh, Meg folded her arms on the straw, and hid her face in them. Robin looked at her with a troubled air for about a minute. Then he spoke to her.

"It's no use doing that," he said.

"It's no use doing anything," Meg answered, her voice muffled in her arms. "I don't want to do this any more than you do. We're so lonely."

"Yes, we're lonely," said Robin. "That's a fact."

And he stared up at the dark rafters above him, and at some birds who were clinging to them and twittering about a nest.

"I said I wished there was a City Beautiful," Meg said; "but it seems to make it worse—that there is going to be something like it—so near—and then that we should never get any nearer to it than two hundred miles."