ld,
and Manoel's broad shoulders shook with enjoyment. He stood Shenton on
his feet, and held him till he got his balance; then the play began
again. Now Lewis felt fear steal over him, yet he could not go away.
There was something inexpressibly comical in the scene, but it was not
this that held him. A strange terror had seized him. Something was the
matter with Shenton. Lewis did not know what it was.

Suddenly Shenton's mood changed to sullen stupor, and Manoel, whose gait
was also unsteady, picked him up and carried him to a spigot, where he
carefully unbuttoned the child's waist and soaked his head in cold
water. The charm was broken. Lewis fled.

CHAPTER IV

Routine is the murderer of time. Held by the daily recurring duties of
her household, Ann Leighton awoke with a gasp to the day that Natalie's
hair went into pigtails and the boys shed kilts for trousers. At the
evening hour she gathered the children to her with an increased
tenderness. Natalie, plump and still rosy, sat in her lap; Shenton, a
mere wisp of a boy, his face pale with a pallor beyond the pallor of the
tropics, pressed his dark, curly head against her heart. Her other arm
encircled Lewis and held him tight, for he was prone to fidget.

They sat on the west veranda and watched the sun plunge to the horizon
from behind a bank of monster clouds. Before them stretched a valley,
for Consolation Cottage was set upon a hill. Beyond the valley, and far
away, rose a line of hills. Suddenly that line became a line of night.
Black night seized upon all the earth; but beyond there arose into the
heavens a light that was more glorious than the light of day. A long sea
of gold seemed to slope away ever so gently, up and up, until it lost
itself beneath the slumberous mass of clouds that curtained its farther
shore. Here and there within the sea hung islets of cloud, as still as
rocks in a waveless ocean.

Natalie stretched out her hand, with chubby fingers outspread, and
squinted between the black bars they made against the light.

"Mother, what's all that?"

Mrs. Leighton was silent for a moment. The children looked up
expectantly into her face, but she was not looking down at them. Her
gaze was fixed upon the afterglow.

"Why," she said at last, "it's a painting of heaven and earth. You see
the black plain that stretches away and away? That's our world, so dark,
so full of ruts, so ugly; but it is the rough plain we all must travel
to reach