Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/165



opened her eyes next day wrapped in the tatters of a dream in which she had been tried by a jury consisting of eleven Mr. Dixes and Othello, and found guilty of black ingratitude in the first degree. The judge, who was Mr. John Rochester dressed as Hamlet with plumes on his head such as hearse-horses wear, sentenced her to be stoned. So she stood up against the wall of the round tower of Cedar Court and the jury threw stones, and all the stones turned to rose-leaves—red and pink and white and yellow and bronze and coral and crimson—and made the ground all round her into the loveliest velvet carpet under which she hastened to hide herself. And when she woke she thought at first that the rose-leaf carpet was still there, but it was only the old, soft, thin velvet patchwork of her bed-quilt, touched to new living glories by the morning sunshine.

The dream was gone, but the dreamer reflected, as she dressed, that the dream-jury had been right. Was it not black ingratitude to shrink from the sudden granting of one's dearest dream? To cry for the moon, and then to grumble because the moon was bigger than the silver shilling it sometimes looks like? To covet Cedar Court, to desire it above all things, to cherish a secret resentment against the Fate which denied it and—then when Cedar Court, suddenly and without reservation, was granted, to shy at it as a nervous horse will at a sieve of oats too suddenly proffered?

Cedar Court was big? The more scope for enterprise! A whole new scheme of life would be needed? What better game could there be than inventing new schemes of life?