And among Patricia’s attendants Colonel Musgrave, it is needless to relate, was preeminently pertinacious.  The two found a deal to talk about, somehow, though it is doubtful if many of their comments were of sufficient importance or novelty to merit record.  Then, also, he often read aloud to her from lovely books, for the colonel read admirably and did not scruple to give emotional passages their value. Trilby, published the preceding spring in book form, was one of these books, for all this was at a very remote period; and the Rubaiyat was another, for that poem was as yet unhackneyed and hardly wellknown enough to be parodied in those happy days.

Once he read to her that wonderful sad tale of Hans Christian Andersen’s which treats of the china chimney-sweep and the shepherdess, who eloped from their bedizened tiny parlor-table, and were frightened by the vastness of the world outside, and crept ignominiously back to their fit home.  “And so,” the colonel ended, “the little china people remained together, and were thankful for the rivet in grandfather’s neck, and continued to love each other until they were broken to pieces.”

“It was really a very lucky thing,” Patricia estimated, “that the grandfather had a rivet in his neck and couldn’t nod to the billy-goat-legged person to take the shepherdess away into his cupboard.  I don’t doubt the little china people were glad of it.  But after climbing so far—­and seeing the stars,—­I think they ought to have had more to be glad for.”  Her voice was quaintly wistful.

“I will let you into a secret—­er—­Patricia.  That rivet was made out of the strongest material in the whole universe.  And the old grandfather was glad, at bottom, he had it in his neck so that he couldn’t nod and separate the shepherdess from the chimney-sweep.”

“Yes,—­I guess he had been rather a rip among the bric-a-brac in his day and sympathized with them?”

“No, it wasn’t just that.  You see these little china people had forsaken their orderly comfortable world on the parlor table to climb very high.  It was a brave thing to do, even though they faltered and came back after a while.  It is what we all want to do, Patricia—­to climb toward the stars,—­even those of us who are too lazy or too cowardly to attempt it.  And when others try it, we are envious and a little uncomfortable, and we probably scoff; but we can’t help admiring, and there is a rivet in the neck of all of us which prevents us from interfering.  Oh, yes, we little china people have a variety of rivets, thank God, to prevent too frequent nodding and too cowardly a compromise with baseness,—­rivets that are a part of us and force us into flashes of upright living, almost in spite of ourselves, when duty and inclination grapple.  There is always the thing one cannot do for the reason that one is constituted as one is.  That, I take it, is the real rivet in grandfather’s neck and everybody else’s.”