The draught of her going drew Mother into place
immediately behind her. Daddy followed close, their respective colours
making it inevitable, and Jinny swept in after him, bright and eager
as a little angel. She tripped on the edge of something he held
tightly in one hand, a woven maze of tiny glittering lines,
exquisitely inter-threaded--a skeleton of beauty, waiting to be filled
in and clothed, yet already alive with spontaneous fire of its own. It
was the Pattern of his story he had been busy with in the corner.
'I won't step on it, Daddy,' she said gravely.
'It doesn't matter if you do. You're in it,' he answered, yet lifted
it higher so that it flew behind him like a banner in the night.
The procession was formed now. Rogers and the younger children came
after their sister at a little distance, and then, flitting to and fro
in darker shades, like a fringe of rich embroidery that framed the
moving picture, came the figures of the sprites, born by Imagination
out of Love in an old Kentish garden years and years ago. They rose
from the tangle of the ancient building. Climbing the shoulder of a
big, blue wind, they were off and away!
It was a jolly night, a windy night, a night without clouds, when all
the lanes of the sky were smooth and swept, and the interstellar
spaces seemed close down upon the earth.
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