he does not express it, and though he would not take any trouble to secure it.  What centuries of trained instincts must have gone to produce this.  The new order has given me a great deal more of Maggie’s society.  We are sent out in the afternoon, because Maud likes to be quite alone to receive the neighbours, small and great, that come to see her, now that she cannot go to see them.  She tells me frankly that my presence only embarrasses them.  And thus another joy has come to me, one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me in my life, and which I can hardly find words to express—­the contact with, the free sight of the mind and soul of an absolutely pure, simple and ingenuous girl.  Maggie’s mind has opened like a flower.  She talks to me with perfect openness of all she feels and thinks; to walk thus, hour by hour, with my child’s arm through my own, her wide-opened, beautiful eyes looking in mine, her light step beside me, with all her pretty caressing ways—­it seems to me a taste of the purest and sweetest love I have ever felt.  It is like the rapture of a lover, but without any shadow of the desirous element that mingles so fiercely and thirstily with our mortal loves, to find myself dear to her.  I have a poignant hunger of the heart to save her from any touch of pain, to smooth her path for her, to surround her with beauty and sweetness.  I did not guess that the world held any love quite like this; there seems no touch of selfishness about it; my love lavishes itself, asking for nothing in return, except that I may be dear to her as she to me.

Her fancies, her hopes, her dreams—­how inexplicable, how adorable!  She said to me to-day that she could never marry, and that it was a real pity that she could not have children of her own without.  “We don’t want any one else, do we, except just some little children to amuse us.”  She is a highly imaginative child, and one of our amusements is to tell each other long, interminable tales of the adventures of a family we call the Pickfords.  I have lost all count of their names and ages, their comings and goings; but Maggie never makes a mistake about them, and they seem to her like real people; and when I sometimes plunge them into disaster, she is so deeply affected that the disasters have all to be softly repaired.  The Pickfords must have had a very happy life; the kind of life that people created and watched over by a tender, patient and detailed Providence might live.  How different from the real world!

But I don’t want Maggie to live in the real world yet awhile.  It will all come pouring in upon her, sorrow, anxiety, weariness, no doubt—­alas that it should be so!  Perhaps some people would blame me, would say that more discipline would be bracing, wholesome, preparatory.  But I don’t believe that.  I had far rather that she learnt that life was tender, gentle and sweet—­and then if she has to face trouble, she will have the strength of feeling that the tenderness, gentleness