enediction on the
day. Signa kneeled down on the grass.

"Did you pray for the holy men?" Bruno asked him when they rose, and
they went on under the tall green quivering trees.

"No," said Signa under his breath. "I prayed for the devil."

"For him?" echoed Bruno aghast; "what are you about, child? Are you
possessed? Do you know what the good priests would say?"

"I prayed for him," said Signa. "It is he who wants it. To be wicked
_there_ where God is, and the sun, and the bells"----

"But he is the foe of God. It is horrible to pray for him."

"No," said Signa, sturdily. "God says we are to forgive our enemies, and
help them. I only asked Him to begin with His."

Bruno was silent.

_TRICOTRIN._

At every point where her eyes glanced there was a picture of exquisite
colour, and light, and variety.

But the scene in its loveliness was so old to her, so familiar, that it
was scarcely lovely, only monotonous. With all a child's usual ignorant
impatience of the joys of the present--joys so little valued at the
time, so futilely regretted in the after-years--she was heedless of the
hour's pleasure, she was longing for what had not come.

* * *

On the whole, the Waif fared better, having fallen to the hands of a
vagabond philosopher, than if she had drifted to those of a respected
philanthropist. The latter would have had her glistening hair shorn
short, as a crown with which that immortal and inconsistent socialist
Nature had no justification in crowning a foundling, and, in his desire
to make her fully expiate the lawless crime of entering the world
without purse or passport, would have left her no choice, as she grew
into womanhood, save that between sinning and starving. The former bade
the long fair tresses float on the air, sunny rebels against bondage,
and saw no reason why the childhood of the castaway should not have its
share of childish joyousness as well as the childhood prince-begotten
and palace-cradled; holding that the fresh life just budded on earth
was as free from all soil, no matter whence it came, as is the brook of
pure rivulet water, no matter whether it spring from classic lake or
from darksome cavern.

* * *

The desire to be "great" possessed her. When that insatiate passion
enters a living soul, be it the soul of a woman-child dreaming of a
coquette's conquests, or a crowned hero craving for a new world, it
becomes blind to all else. M