partook of big saffron buns, that Marjorie said would spoil his
dinner, but that didn't. Nothing, he felt, could have spoilt anything
that day.

With evening and the last whirring of the thresher Ishmael, watching him
at play, felt, as he always had, that it is impossible to watch children
without an ache for the inevitable pity of it that they should have to
grow up. It was not, he felt, because they are particularly happy--for
never again can there be griefs blacker than those which darken all a
child's horizon, but simply because they stand for something beautiful
which can never come again. Now, looking at Jim and the other children,
he felt the old pity, but tinged with something new. For the first time
he saw that it was only by realising that children were symbols, the
mere passing exponents of a lovely thing which was itself ever present,
that it became possible to look at them without that aching. There would
always be, he supposed, some people who could look at children and feel,
not so much pity that these young things must age as self-pity that they
themselves had lost childhood; but others looked as he always had, with
a more impersonal pang, sorry that so beautiful a thing should fade. And
it was for the comfort of such as he to realise that it did not matter
in the least, because, though children grew up and away, childhood
remained--a bright banner carried from hand to hand, always in a new
grasp before the old one could tarnish it. More, he saw that it was this
very evanescence which had for him given childhood its sadness that also
gave it its beauty; if there were anywhere on earth a race of perpetual
children it would not be beautiful. For he saw that it was the
inevitable slipping-away of all life which gave poignancy to loveliness.

He spoke something of his thought to Lissa, and she nodded in
comprehension.

"That's why no picture or sculpture can be as beautiful as the human
model," she said, "not because of any necessary inferiority, but simply
in the terrible permanence of man's work as compared with God's."

They stood a while longer side by side, and then Jimmy, who with the
last whirring note of the thresher suddenly felt very tired, came and
leant up against his grandfather. Ishmael stooped over the boy, and with
a great heave, despite Marjorie's protests--she had come out to take her
son to bed--he hoisted him up to his old bowed shoulder.

"Say good-night to the thresher," he told hi