The Heart's Kingdom

And from that morning a queer kind of dawn life went on between the

small boy and me. Morning after morning he threw a pebble to waken me

and I hurried down to our tryst, which extended through the hour that

lies between the crack of day and the first glint of the awakening sun.

At first I had carried sweetmeats to our tryst, which were accepted

with moderate pleasure, but one morning I had taken a huge volume of

Rackham's Mother Goose which Nickols had brought me, and from then on

our hour had been one of spiritual communion. I found the young mind

insatiate and I had to ransack the library for stories and poems and

pictures suitable to his years, though he rapidly developed a very

advanced taste. The morning I read him the Shakespearian lines woven

around the little Princes in the Tower, having suitably connected up the

story for him with words of my own, we forgot the time and he overstayed

his limit, for Dabney was opening the house when he fled. For five

mornings he did not come and I could find no way to get news of him. I

asked Mikey and got a maddening response.

"They shut up Stray in the back yard because he's a shame to old Jake,"

was his answer to my question. "Jake would shoot anybody that climbed

that fence."

"I bet I could get over and the bad man not see if I could get out in

the dark," Charlotte declared as she stood listening to my questioning.

"And I am going after Stranger that way, too, if ever they leave the

front door to my house unlocked. It is wicked to shut up a little boy,

and the devil would help me get him out." Charlotte's purpose was high

if she did slightly mix her theology.

That night a wonderful thing happened in my moonlit room. I was dead

asleep when I felt a soft hand stroking my face, and then my hair, and I

awoke to find the Stray standing by my bed.

"They tied me in bed when they found out I had runned away in the

mornings to see you, but I gnawed the rope that he put, because I wanted

to tell you that I can go to the big school when it opens because

Minister told him that he would be put in jail if I didn't. It is a law.

I heard him last night, and mother cried a long time, for what, I don't

know. Was she glad or sorry? Do you know?"

"No, darling, I don't know, and I wish I did," I answered him as I put

my arms around him while he snuggled his black-crested head down beside

mine on the pillow.