Unto them I will discover--not
a swan's nest among the reeds, as Mrs. Browning has it, but an old yellow
pitcher that their lovely grandmother was in trouble about fifty years
ago."
"It will be a hundred and fifty years old then," returned Marjorie,
seriously, "and I think," she added rebukingly, "that _you_ were building
castles then."
"I had you and the pitcher for the foundation," said Miss Prudence, in a
tone of mock humility.
"Don't you think--" Marjorie's face had a world of suggestion in
it--"that 'The Swan's Nest' is bad influence for girls? Little Ellie sits
alone and builds castles about her lover, even his horse is 'shod in
silver, housed in azure' and a thousand serfs do call him master, and he
says 'O, Love, I love but thee.'"
"But all she looks forward to is showing him the swan's nest among the
reeds! And when she goes home, around a mile, as she did daily, lo, the
wild swan had deserted and a rat had gnawed the reeds. That was the end
of her fine castle!"
"'If she found the lover, ever,
Sooth, I know not, but I know
She could never show him, never,
That swan's nest among the reeds,'"
quoted Marjorie. "So it did all come to nothing."
"As air-castles almost always do. But we'll hope she found something
better."
"Do people?" questioned Marjorie.
"Hasn't God things laid up for us better than we can ask or think or
build castles about?"
"I _hope_ so," said Marjorie; "but Hollis Rheid's mother told mother
yesterday that her life was one long disappointment.
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