The little girl held out her hand to David.
“What is your name?” he asked her as he took it.
“Ruth,” said the child. “And yours?”
They became friends at once and for ever and ever and ever.
The months passed by, and David and Ruth worked and worked for the Cobbler—for both he and his wife knew how to keep the children busy. But as time went on, the two children grew older and wiser, till at last they grew so wise that they saw right through the old Cobbler and his wife. They knew that the pair pretended a great deal that was not true, simply in order to keep the children in ignorance so that they would fear their elders. For there is nothing that keeps one so filled with fear as ignorance. Many persons who want power just for themselves alone know this, and therefore try to keep others bound in the heavy chains of ignorance.
Many months passed, then. Yet to Ruth and David they seemed but weeks; for the two were held under a certain spell which kept them always in the same state of blindness to past and future. Therefore time, as we know it, had hardly any existence for them; for, in the land where they now dwelt, this was the Law.
So the children grew and grew. And as they grew physically, they also grew mentally. Soon they were approaching the very borderland of womanhood and manhood. The old Cobbler and his wife were really kind enough to them: the only thing that one could find fault with was their extreme selfishness—for selfish they certainly were. Their selfishness showed in their wish that David and Ruth should never hear or know anything that might make the boy and girl restless or desire something other than what the old couple saw fit to give them; for they
