Meg and Robin regarded her with interest. Aunt Matilda and the Midway Plaisance, taken together, would be such a startling contrast that they must be interesting. And as she looked at John Holt’s face, as they went on their way, Meg knew he was thinking the same thing. And it was a strange experience. Mrs. Jennings strode through the curious places rather as if she were following a plough down a furrow. She looked at Samoan beauties, Arab chiefs, and Persian Jersey Lilies with unmovedly scrutinizing eyes. She did not waste time anywhere, but she took all in as if it were a matter of business. Camel drivers and donkey boys seemed to strike her merely as samples of slow travelling; she ascended, as it were into mid-heaven, on the Ferris Wheel, with a grim air of determination. Being so lifted from earth and poised above in the clear air, Meg had thrilled with a strange, exultant feeling of being a bird, and it had seemed to her that, with a moment’s flutter of wings, she could soar higher and higher, and lose herself in the pure sea of blue above. Aunt Matilda looked down with cool interest.
“Pretty big power this,” she said to John Holt. “I guess it’s made one man’s fortune.”
John Holt was a generous host. He took her from place to place—to Lapland villages, Cannibal huts, and Moorish palaces. She tramped about, and inspected them all with a sharp, unenthusiastic eye. She looked at the men and women, and their strange costumes, plainly thinking them rather mad.
“It’s a queer sight,” she said to John Holt; “but I don’t see what good all this is going to do any one.”
“It saves travelling expenses,” answered John Holt, laughing. His shrewd, humorous face was very full of expression all the time they were walking about together. She had only come for the day, and she was going back by a night train. When she left them, she gave them both one of those newly appreciative looks.
“Well,” she said, “Mr. Holt’s going to look after you, he says. He’s got something to tell you when I’m gone. We’ve talked it over, and it’s all right. There’s one thing sure, you’re two of the luckiest young ones I’ve heard of.” And she marched away briskly.
Meg and Robin looked at each other and at John Holt. What was he going to tell them? But he told them nothing until they had all dined, and Ben and his mother had gone home, prepared to come again the next day.
By that time the City Beautiful was wreathed with its enchanted jewels of light again, and in the lagoon’s depths they trembled and blazed. John Holt called a gondola with a brilliant gondolier, and they got into it and shot out into the radiant night.
The sight was so unearthly in its beauty that for a few moments they were quite still. Meg sat in her Straw Parlor attitude, with her elbows on her knees, and her chin on her hands. Her eyes looked very big, and as lustrous as the jewels in the lagoon.
“I’m going to ask you something,” said John Holt, in a quiet sort of voice, at last.