And Bella indicated a small boy carrying a tray of sweets who had advanced towards the three with a hopeful grin.
"I'd perfectly love to have some of those lossingers, but mother says 'street candy isn't pure.' Besides, it's Sunday."
"Nonsense!" exclaimed Fairfax. "Do you mean to say that out here in God's free air you are going to preach me a sermon?"
He beckoned the boy.
"Oh," cried Gardiner, "can't we choose, Cousin Antony?"
The little cousins bent above the tray and slowly and passionately selected, and their absorption in the essence of wintergreen, sassafras, and peppermint showed him how much this pleasure meant to these rich children. Their pockets full, they linked their arms in his again.
"I have never had such fun in all my life as I do with you, Cousin Antony," Bella told him.
"Then come along," he suggested, recklessly. "You must ride once on the merry-go-round." And before the little Puritans realized the extent of their impiety, Fairfax
had lifted Bella on a horse and Gardiner on an elephant, paid their fare and started them away. He watched Bella, her hat caught by its elastic, fallen off her head on the first round, her cheeks flushed and her eyes like stars, and bravely her straight little arm stretched out to catch the ring. There was triumph in her cry, "Oh, Cousin Antony, Cousin Antony, I've won the ring!"
Such flash and sparkle as there was about her, with her teeth like grains of corn and her eyes dancing as she nodded and smiled at him! Poor little Gardiner! Antony paid for him again and patted him on the back. There was a pathos about the mild, sweet little face and in the timid, ineffectual arm, too short and too weak to snap the iron ring on to his sword. Bella rode till "Annie Laurie" changed to "Way down upon de Swanee river," and Fairfax's heart beat for Louisiana, and he had come to the end of his nickels. He lifted the children down.