DURING the next three weeks the two conspirators were wildly busy. Money is a key which smooths many   
difficulties, and the path before them was triumphantly easy.
 
Jasper found Miss Mason a little hard to understand during these days. She had a way of looking at him 
 
and then giving vent to odd little chuckles of laughter. He hoped she was not becoming childish.
 
She received several letters from the donkey tourists. One, received about the tenth day, told her 
 
that another of her schemes was on the way to be started.
 
“We are,” wrote Barnabas, “enjoying ourselves immensely. The weather is glorious, and Pegasus a 
 
model of well-behaved donkeyness. He certainly deserves wings, even though he hasn’t got them. But I 
 
heard Pippa telling him in a consoling voice the other day that when he reached heaven he’d be 
 
provided with a pair of beautiful white ones. I fancy she sees in herself a female Bellerophon soaring 
 
aloft and through golden streets on a grey donkey. If the golden streets are anything like as 
 
beautiful as the country lanes through which we are driving we shall be happy. I wish you could see 
 
them—the lanes, I mean. They are a bower of fairy delight. Wild roses, honeysuckle, and meadow-sweet 
 
seem to vie with each other in filling the warm air with perfume. Larks—I never knew before that the 
 
world held so many—sing to us from heaven, the sweetest feathered choristers. Last night a 
 
nightingale sang to us in the light of a full moon. It was the first Pippa had heard. There was 
 
something almost terrifying in her rapture. She feels almost too keenly. She is, however, absolutely 
 
in her element, and if I had ever felt any real doubt about her being the child of Kostolitz I should 
 
only have needed to see her out here to convince me. At times she finds the most adorable bits of 
 
language in which to express her emotions. But then it is always some little thing like the colour of 
 
a flower-chalice or the glint of the kingfisher’s blue. We saw one the other day. It skimmed up a bit 
 
of transparent water and perched on a piece of stick in midstream. Pippa and I watched it, holding our 
 
breath. All at once something—I don’t know what—startled it. There was a streak of iridescent 
 
colour and it had gone. But it left us both with the joyous feeling of discovery. The bird is too rare 
 
and too beautiful to leave one entirely unmoved. Pippa could talk of that [Pg 206]incident. It is the 
 
bigger aspects of Nature that hold her dumb. We came to a wood one evening—pines, straight and solemn 
 
as the aisles of a cathedral, the setting sun slanting down the long spaces. Pippa’s face was a 
 
marvel. She just put her hand up to her throat and held it there as if it ached with the beauty of the 
 
thing, and then she made the sign of the Cross. It was holy ground, though there had been no priestly 
 
ceremonial to proclaim it so. Only the wind was there to whisper a benediction, and the trees 
 
themselves were like priests scattering the incense of their fragrant breath. The very memory of it 
 
brings thoughts of poetry to my mind. But again to Pippa. She’s yours, and I want you to know her as 
 
I’m seeing her now, for it’s the essence of her—the spirit of Kostolitz I’m seeing. A long line of 
 
cawing rooks, whether at sunset or against the blue sky, affects her strangely. It seems to make her 
 
unutterably sad. Temporarily only, I am glad to say, for she is the gayest of children, and delights 
 
in the smallest of pleasures—namely, a pennyworth of bull’s-eyes and sticks of pink-and-white 
 
striped stuff which we buy from extremely minute shops, whose windows are crammed below with apples—
 
foreign, of course—and nuts. Above the apples and nuts are rows of glass bottles full of pear-drops, 
 
lemon-drops, peppermints, and barley-sugar, also sugar candy the real article, rough and scrunchly on 
 
a string. And somewhere in the window, very inconspicuous, is a slit through which one can drop 
 
letters—the sweetstuff shop is always the post office. But sweets evidently take decided precedence 
 
over such minor considerations as letters and postage stamps. There is always a garden leading up to 
 
the shop, and it is always crammed with flowers, the stiff old-fashioned kind—sweet-williams, stocks, 
 
marigolds, mignonette, asters, and such-like. There are bushes, too, of lavender, and lad’s-love. I 
 
painted one of them, but somehow did not hit it off. I’ve made another sketch, though, of a pond, a 
 
willow, meadow-sweet, and blue hills, which pleases me quite a lot. In fact, I was so absorbed in it 
 
that I lost Pippa. You needn’t be anxious, because she is found again, and with her something you 
 
wanted, namely, the first candidate for your School of a Wonderful Chance. I had just finished my 
 
sketch, and having come back to the practicalities of life realized that Pippa had been absent for two 
 
hours. When lo! and behold she appeared, and with her a loose-limbed fellow of about twenty. When he 
 
fills out he will rival Dan in size—but that is beside the mark.
 
“‘Barnabas,’ she cried—ceremony and with it the Monsieur has lapsed into disuse in the open air—
 
‘do look at ze lovely little figure ’e ’as made. ‘Is name is Andrew McAndrew.’ And she rolled her 
 
r’s with gusto. Well, it is pleasant to think [Pg 208]that Pippa should be the one ............