Lilies floated in circles about the ponds, like the crowns of sunken queens, and sometimes a bird broke the silence with a frightened cry.
It was here that Beatrice and Wonder would often take their morning walk,--Wonder, though but a little girl of four, having grown more and more of a companion to her mother, since Antony's love for Silencieux.
A morning in August the two were walking hand in hand.

Wonder was one of those little girls that seem to know all the meanings of life, while yet struggling with the alphabet of its unimportant words.
The soul of such a child is, of all things, the most mysterious.

There was that in her face, as she clung on to her mother's hand, which seemed to say: "O mother, I understand it all, and far more; if I might only talk to you in the language of heaven,--but my words are like my little legs, frail and uncertain of their footing, and, while I think all your strange grown-up thoughts, I can only talk of toys and dolls.

Mother, father's blood as well as yours is in my veins, and so I understand you both.

Poor little mother! Poor little father!" Little Wonder looked these things, she may indeed have thought them; but all she said was: "O mother, what was that ?" "That was a rabbit, dear.