was the greater difficulty. Robert would not hear of the
factory, for reasons best known to himself, and there were serious
objections to taking it to Dooble Sanny. It was resolved that the only
way was to seize the right moment, and creep upstairs with it before
presenting themselves to Mrs. Falconer. Their intended manoeuvres with
the kite would favour the concealment of this stroke.

Before they entered the town they drew in the kite a little way, and cut
off a dozen yards of the string, which Robert put in his pocket, with
a stone tied to the end. When they reached the house, Shargar went into
the little garden and tied the string of the kite to the paling between
that and Captain Forsyth's. Robert opened the street door, and having
turned his head on all sides like a thief, darted with his violin up
the stairs. Having laid his treasure in one of the presses in Shargar's
garret, he went to his own, and from the skylight threw the stone down
into the captain's garden, fastening the other end of the string to the
bedstead. Escaping as cautiously as he had entered, he passed hurriedly
into their neighbour's garden, found the stone, and joined Shargar. The
ends were soon united, and the kite let go. It sunk for a moment, then,
arrested by the bedstead, towered again to its former 'pride of place,'
sailing over Rothieden, grand and unconcerned, in the wastes of air.

But the end of its tether was in Robert's garret. And that was to him a
sense of power, a thought of glad mystery. There was henceforth, while
the dragon flew, a relation between the desolate little chamber, in
that lowly house buried among so many more aspiring abodes, and the
unmeasured depths and spaces, the stars, and the unknown heavens. And
in the next chamber lay the fiddle free once more,--yet another magical
power whereby his spirit could forsake the earth and mount heavenwards.

All that night, all the next day, all the next night, the dragon flew.

Not one smile broke over the face of the old lady as she received them.
Was it because she did not know what acts of disobedience, what breaches
of the moral law, the two children of possible perdition might have
committed while they were beyond her care, and she must not run the risk
of smiling upon iniquity? I think it was rather that there was no smile
in her religion, which, while it developed the power of a darkened
conscience, overlaid and half-smothered all the lovelier impulses of her
grand n