“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 the children 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 this. We just have to, you see. Perhaps we say things that would seem very funny to religious people—I don’t think we’re religious but—but we do like it.”
“Do you?” said John Holt. “Perhaps I should, too. You shall tell me some stories about it, and you shall put Her there. If I could feel as if she were somewhere!”
“Oh,” said Meg, “she must be somewhere, you know. She couldn’t go out, John Holt.”
He cast his broad glance all around, and caught his breath, as if remembering.
“Lord, Lord!” he said. “No! She couldn’t go out!”
Meg knew afterwards why he said this with such force. “She” had been a creature who was so full of life, and of the joy of living. She had been gay, and full of laughter and humor. She had had a wonderful, vivid mind, which found color and feeling and story in the commonest things. She had been so clever and so witty, and such a bright and warm thing in her house. When she had gone away from earth so suddenly, people had said, with wonder, “But it seemed as if she could not die!” But she had died, and her child had died too, scarcely an hour after it was born, and John Holt had been left stunned and aghast, and almost stricken into gloomy madness. And in some way Meg was like her, with her vivid little face and her black-lashed eyes, her City Beautiful and her dreams and stories, which made the realities of her life. It was a strange chance, a marvellously kind chance, which had thrown them together; these two, who were of such different worlds, and yet, who needed each other so much.