before the memory of the oldest cottager they had rested from their
labours, and lived only the life of beauty and silence. Where iron had
once been was now the wild rose, and the grim wounds of the earth had
been healed by the kisses of five hundred springs.

About these ponds stole many a secret path, veined with clumsy roots,
shadowed with the thick bush of many a clustering parasite, and echoing
sometimes beneath from the hollowed shelter of coot or water-rat. Lilies
floated in circles about the ponds, like the crowns of sunken queens,
and sometimes a bird broke the silence with a frightened cry.

It was here that Beatrice and Wonder would often take their morning
walk,--Wonder, though but a little girl of four, having grown more and
more of a companion to her mother, since Antony's love for Silencieux.

A morning in August the two were walking hand in hand. Wonder was one of
those little girls that seem to know all the meanings of life, while yet
struggling with the alphabet of its unimportant words.

The soul of such a child is, of all things, the most mysterious. There
was that in her face, as she clung on to her mother's hand, which seemed
to say: "O mother, I understand it all, and far more; if I might only
talk to you in the language of heaven,--but my words are like my little
legs, frail and uncertain of their footing, and, while I think all your
strange grown-up thoughts, I can only talk of toys and dolls. Mother,
father's blood as well as yours is in my veins, and so I understand you
both. Poor little mother! Poor little father!"

Little Wonder looked these things, she may indeed have thought them;
but all she said was: "O mother, what was that?"