The gates ajar. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

228 The Gates Ajar.
sense of the ludicrous and the horrible, that I
should have spent the afternoon like a baby,
and almost as happily, laughing out with the
child, past and future forgotten, the tremendous risks of "I spy " absorbing all my present; while what was happening was happening, and what was to come was coming. Not
an echo in the air, not a prophecy in the
sunshine, not a note of warning in the song of
the robins that watched me from the appleb'ughs!
As the long, golden afternoon slid away, we
came out by the front gate to watch for the
child's mother. I was tired, and, lying back
on the grass, gave Faith some pink and purple
larkspurs, that she might amuse herself in
making a chain of them. The picture that
she made sitting there on the short, dying
grass -the light which broke all about her
and over her at the first, creeping slowly down
and away to the west, her little fingers linking
the rich, bright flowers tube, into tube, the
dimple on her cheek and the love in her eyes
-has photographed itself into my thinking.
How her voice rang out, when the wheels
sounded at last, and the carriage, somewhat
slowly -driven, stopped!