Stranica 137 [137]
LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY. 117
big psalter open in his hands, singing with all his childish might,
his face a little uplifted, happily; and as he sang, a long ray of sun¬
shine crept in and, slanting through a golden pane of a stained glass
window, brightened the falling hair about his young head. His
mother, as she looked at him across the church, felt a thrill pass
through her heart, and a prayer rose in it too,—a prayer that the
pure, simple happiness of his childish soul might last, and that the
strange, great fortune which had fallen to him might bring no wrong
or evil with it. There were many soft, anxious thoughts in her ten¬
der heart in those new days.
‘Oh, Ceddie!” she had said to him the evening before, as she
hung over him in saying good-night, before he went away; "oh,
Ceddie, dear, | wish for your sake I was very clever and could say
a great many wise things! But only be good, dear, only be brave,
only be kind and true always, and then you will never hurt any one,
so long as you live, and you may help many, and the big world may
be better because my little child was born. And that is best of all,
Ceddie,—it is better than everything else, that the world should be
a little better because a man has lived—even ever so little better,
dearest.” |
And on his return to the Castle, Fauntleroy had repeated her
words to his grandfather.
“And I thought about you when she said that,” he ended; "and
I told her that was the way the world was because you had lived,
and I was going to try if I could be like you.”
‘And what did she say to that?” asked his lordship, a trifle
uneasily.
‘She said that was right, and we must always look for good in
people and try to be like it.”
Perhaps it was this the old man remembered as he glanced
through the divided folds of the red curtain of his pew. Many