e town among trees.

"This is where we disembark," said the little girl cousin. "The King
lies here to-night at Sir Thomas Bradbury's. And we lie at our
grandfather's house. And to-morrow it is the Masque in Sir Thomas's
Park. And we are to see it. I am glad thou'st well of thy fever,
Richard. I shouldn't have liked it half so well if thou hadn't been
here," she said, smiling. And of course that was a very nice thing to
have said to one.

"And then we go home to Deptford with thee," said the boy cousin. "We
are to stay a month. And we'll see thy galleon, and get old Sebastian to
make me one too...."

"Yes," said Dickie, as the boat came against the quay. "What _is_ this
place?"

"Gravesend, thou knowest that," said the little cousins, "or hadst thou
forgotten that, too, in thy fever?"

"Gravesend?" Dickie repeated, in quite a changed voice.

"Come, children," said the aunt--oh, what a different aunt to the one
who had slapped Dickie in Deptford, sold the rabbit-hutch, and shot the
moon!--"you boys remember how I showed you to carry my train. And my
girl will not forget how to fling the flowers from the gilt basket as
the King and Queen come down the steps."

The grandfather's house and garden--the stately, white-haired
grandfather, whom they called My Lord, and who was, it seemed, the
aunt's father--the banquet, the picture-gallery, the gardens lit up by
little colored oil lamps hung in festoons from tree to tree, the blazing
torches, the music, the Masque--a sort of play without words in which
every one wore the most wonderful and beautiful dresses, and the Queen
herself took a part dressed all in gauze and jewels and white swan's
feathers--all these things were like a dream to Dickie, and through it
all the words kept on saying themselves to him very gently, very
quietly, and quite without stopping--

"Gravesend. That's where the lodging-house is where Beale is waiting for
you--the man you called father. You promised to go there as soon as you
could. Why haven't you gone? Gravesend. That's where the lodging-house
is where Beale----" And so on, over and over again.

And how can any one enjoy anything when this sort of thing keeps on
saying itself under and over and through and between everything he sees
and hears and feels and thinks? And the worst of it was that now, for
the first time since he had found that he was not lame, he felt--more
than felt, he knew--that the old New Cross life had not been a fever