XV
Before they entered the Court of Honor Meg stopped them both. She was palpitating with excitement.
“Robin,” she said, “let us make him shut his eyes. Then you can take one of his hands and I can take the other, and we will lead him. And when we have taken him to the most heavenly place, he shall look—suddenly!”
“I should like that,” said Ben, tremulous with anticipation.
“All right,” said Robin.
By this time it was as if they had been friends all their lives. They knew each other. They had not ceased talking a moment since they set out, but it had not been about the Fair. Meg had decided that nothing should be described beforehand; that all the entrancement of beauty should burst upon Ben’s hungry soul, as Paradise bursts upon translated spirits.
“I don’t want it to be gradual,” she said, anxiously. “I want it to be sudden! It can be gradual after.”
She was an artist and an epicure in embryo, this child. She tasted her joys with a delicate palate, and lost no flavor of them. The rapture of yesterday was intensified ten-fold to-day, because she felt it throbbing anew in this frail body beside her, in which Nature had imprisoned a soul as full of longings as her own, but not so full of power.
They took Ben by either hand, and led him with the greatest care. He shut his eyes tight, and walked between them. People who glanced at them smiled, recognizing the time-honored and familiar child trick. They did not know that this time it was something more than that.
“The trouble is,” Meg said in a low voice to Robin, “I don’t know which is the most heavenly place to stand. Sometimes I think it is at one end, and sometimes at the other, and sometimes at the side.”