“Tell me what is your thought of him,” he said, gently, taking the reins from her hands. “You see you cannot talk and drive, too. Daisy was walking into a fence.”
She gave up the reins without any consciousness of the action; she was looking at her Cousin Don’s face as she had told a “picture” of it to her mother.
“He is so fine, so unselfish, so true, so considerate, a refuge from everything that troubles me, a part of my mother to me—I have saved all his letters, they are my chief treasures. If I should be disappointed in him the sun would drop out of the sky.”
“Poor little girl,” thought the man beside her, tenderly. “Suppose you are disappointed in me,” he asked, lightly; “have you ever thought about that?”
“No. I cannot even _think_ that,” she said, impulsively.
“Because you have not placed me on any such pedestal?”
“No, for when I was a little girl I placed my Cousin Don and his friend Roger on the same pedestal. You haven’t tumbled off yet, and I’ve been with you ever since.”
“Judith, I do not like that,” he answered, seriously; “you shouldn’t look at people like that.”
“I don’t. At people. But I do at you, and Don, and Marion, and Aunt Affy and Ruskin and George Macdonald and Miss Mulock and Tennyson and—”
“Then I will not be frightened if we are all there. If one of us fail, you will have all the others to keep the sun in your sky.”
“Now, give me back the reins, because I have told you.”
He laid the reins in her hand, asking what she had been doing with herself all the morning.
“O, Judith, not another one,” he exclaimed in pretended dismay.
“I had to. It was burning in my bones. Don’t you know I got five dollars for the last one?”
“Can nothing but a five-dollar bill quench the burning in your bones?”
“Oh, yes; the burning is quenched by writing it. I am quenched now for quite a while.”
“I will read it to you in your earliest leisure.”
“Do you intend to keep this thing up and be a dreadful literary creature?”
“But while you muse the fire burns; you must give up musing.”
“No, dear. Give everything that is _in_ you. That is what it is in you for.”
“I know that,” she answered, confidently. “In almost all your sermons I find a thought to make a story of.”
“You illustrate me. I am the author; you are the artist.”