The House of Fulfilment. George Madden Martin

behind her.

      “Who is the child?” he asked his sister.

      “Her name is Carringford. She is a grand-daughter of the old Methodist minister who lives at the corner; secretary of his church board, or something, isn’t he? I’ve noticed two or three little Carringfords playing in the yard as I go by, and all of them handsome.”

      Austen placed them at once. The child’s mother was the daughter of the old minister, and, with husband and children, lived in the little brown house with him. An interest in the details of the human affairs about him was an unexpected phase in Austen’s character. He liked to know what a man was doing, his income, his habits, his family ties.

      “I know Carringford,” he remarked; “he is book-keeper for Williams, a good, steady man. As you say, a handsome child, exceedingly so.”

      Harriet watched until the little niece joined the group outside. “Gregarious little creatures they seem to be,” she remarked. There was good-humour in her tone, but there was no understanding.

      The next day was Sunday. On Monday it rained. Tuesday evening Alexina stood at the parlour window as before, looking out. The little figure looked very solitary.

      “May I go play?” suddenly she asked. The voice was low, there was no note even of wistfulness, it was merely the question. There are children who suffer silently.

      “Why not?” Harriet rejoined, looking up from her magazine. She was the last person to restrict any one needlessly.

      The little niece went forth. The children had not come for her again. Perhaps they did not want her, but, even with this fear upon her, go she must.

      At the gate she paused and with the big house in its immaculate yard behind her, gazed up and down.

      It was a quiet street with the houses set irregularly back from fences of varying patterns, and the brick sidewalks were raised and broken in places by the roots of huge sycamores and maples along the curbs.

      But the cropped head of Alexina turned this way and that in vain. The street was deserted, the stillness lonesome. She swallowed hard. She knew where the little girl named Emily Carringford lived, for she had pointed out the house that first evening as they ran past in play, so Alexina slowly crossed the street, hoping Emily might be at her gate.

      But first, as she went along, came a wide brick cottage, sitting high above a basement, a porch across the front. She gazed in between the pickets of the fence, for it seemed nice in there. The ground was mossy under the trees, and the untrimmed bushes made bowers with their branches. She would like to play in this yard. Her eyes travelled on to the house. A gentleman sat in a cane arm-chair at the foot of the steps, smoking, and on the porch was a lady in a white dress with ribbons. The house looked old and the yard looked old, and so did the gentleman, but the lady was young; maybe she was going to a party, for it was a gauzy dress and the ribbons were rosy.

      Alexina liked the cottage and the lady, and the big, wide yard, and somehow did not feel as lonesome as she had. She started on to find Emily, but at that moment the gate of the cottage swung out across her path. How could she know that the boy upon it, lonely, too, had planned the thing from the moment of her starting up the street?

      “Oh,” said Alexina, and stopped, and looked at the boy, uncomfortably immaculate in fresh white linen clothes, but he was absorbed in the flight of a bird across the rosy western sky.

      “Come and play,” said the straightforward Alexina. Companionship was what she was in search of.

      The boy, without looking at her, shook his head, not so much as if he meant no, but as if he did not know how to say yes.

      Perhaps she divined this, for approaching the gate and fingering its hasp, she asked,

      “Why?”

      The boy, assuming a sort of passivity of countenance as for cover to shyness, kicked at the gate, then scowled as he twisted his neck within the stiff circle of his round collar with the combative air of one who wars against starch. “There’s nobody to play with,” he said; “they’ve all gone to the Sunday-school picnic. I don’t go to that church,” nodding in the direction of a brick structure down the street.

      “You go to the same one as my Aunt Harriet and my uncle,” Alexina informed him. “I saw you there, and your name is William. I heard the lady calling you that, coming out.”

      The gate which had swung in swung out again, bringing the boy nearer this outspoken little girl, whose unconsciousness was putting him more at his ease. He had seen her at church, too, but he could not have told her so.

      “What’s the rest of your name—William what?”

      Such a question makes a shy person very miserable, but the interest was pleasing.

      “William Leroy,” said the boy tersely. Then, as if in amend for the abruptness, he added: “Sometimes they call it the other way, King William, you know.”

      “Who do?”

      “Father and mother.”

      “You mean when you’re pretending?”

      The gate stopped in its jerkings. There had been enough about the name. He was an imperious youngster. “No, I don’t,” he said; “it’s William Leroy backward.”

      The little girl looked mystified, but evidently thought best to change a subject about which the person concerned seemed testy. “I saw one once,” she said sociably; “a real one. He was in a carriage, with horses and soldiers, and a star on his coat.”

      “One what?” demanded the boy.

      “A king, a real one, you know.”

      Now, this princeling on the gate knew when his own sex were guying and he knew the remedy. He did not know this little girl, but he would not have thought it of her.

      “A real—what?” he demanded.

      “A real king, but they don’t say king; they say ‘l’empereur.’”

      William looked stern. “I don’t know what you mean,” he returned; “where did you see any king?”

      The grave eyes were not one bit abashed. “In Paris, where we lived,” said the little girl. “There was a boy named Tommy watching at the hotel window, too, and he said, ‘Vive le roi,’ and Marie, my bonne, she said, ‘Sh—h: l’empereur!’”

      The effect of this was unexpected, for the boy, descending from the gate, turned a keenly irradiated countenance upon her. “Do you mean Paris, my father’s Paris, Paris in France?”

      “Why,” said the little girl, regarding him with some surprise, “yes.” For he was taking her by the hand in a masterful fashion.

      “Come in,” he commanded. “I want you to tell father; that’s father there.”

      But Alexina, friendly soul, went willingly enough with him through the gate and up the wide pavement between bordering beds of unflourishing perennials.

      “Listen, father,” William Leroy was calling to the gentleman at the foot of the steps; “she’s been in Paris, your Paris.”

      The gentleman’s ivory-tinted fingers removed the cigar from his lips. As he turned the western light fell on his lean, clean-shaven face, thin-flanked beneath high cheek-bones. From between grey brows thick as a finger rose a Louis Philippe nose, its Roman prominence accentuated by the hollowness of the cheeks. The iron-grey hair, thrown back off the face, fell, square-cut, to the coat collar behind.

      Never a word spoke the gentleman, only, cigar in hand, waited, eagle-countenanced, sphinx-like. Yet straight Alexina came to his side, and her baby eyes, quick to dilate, now confidingly calm, met the ones looking out piercingly from their retreat beneath the heavy brows, and quite as a matter of course a little hand rested on his knee as she stood there, and equally as naturally, his face impassive, did