She was proud, too.  Robert saw how she disdained the gaping multitude.  She rode with haughtily lifted head and only once her glance, under the white, arrogant lids, dropped for an instant.  Was it chance, was it the agonized intensity of his own gaze which drew it to the small boy almost under her horse’s hoofs? (For he had held his ground.  He was not afraid.  Unlike the rest, his trust in her was limitless and unquestioning.  And if she chose to ride him down, he would not care, no more than a fanatic worshipper beneath the wheels of a Juggernaut.) Now under her eyes his heart stood still, his knees shook.  She did not smile; she did not recognize his naked, shameless adoration.  And that too was well.  A smile would have lowered her, brought her down from her superb distance.  His happiness choked him.  She was the embodiment of everything that he had heard pass in the distance from the silent dusks of Acacia Grove—­splendour and power, laughter and music, the beat of a secret pulse answering the tread of invisible processions.  She came riding out of the mists of his fancy into light, a living reality that he could take hold of, and set up in his empty temple.  She was not his mother, nor Francey, nor God, but she was everything that in their vague and different ways these three had been to him before he lost them.  She was something to be worshipped, to be died for, if necessary, with joy and pride.

But in a moment it was over.  She looked away from him and rode forward, like a monarch into a grandly illuminated castle, amidst the whispered plaudits of her people.

A little girl on a Shetland pony rode at her heels, Robert saw her without wanting to see her.  She obtruded herself vulgarly.  She was dressed as a page, her painfully thin legs looking like sticks of peppermint in their parti-coloured tights, and either was, or pretended to be, terrified of her minute and tubbily good-natured mount.  At its first move forward she fell upon its neck with shrill screams and clung on grotesquely, righting herself at last to make mock faces at the grinning crowd.

“Oh, la, la—­la-la!”

She was a plain child with a large nose, slightly Jewish in line, a wide mouth, and a mass of crinkly fair hair that stood out in a pert halo about her head.  Robert hated her for the brief moment in which she invaded his consciousness.  It was quite evident that she was trying to draw attention from the splendid creature who had preceded her to her own puny and outrageous self, and that by some means or other she succeeded.  She gesticulated, she drew herself up in horrible imitation of a proud and noble bearing, she pretended that the rotund pony was prancing to the music, and, finally, burst into fits of laughter.  The crowd laughed with her, helplessly as though at a huge joke which she shared with each one of them in secret.

“Oh, la la, la la.”

The man at Robert’s side wiped his eyes.