Dickie was very happy. The little cousins were so friendly and jolly, the grown-up people so kind--everything so beautiful and so clean. It was a perfect day. The river was very beautiful; it ran between banks of willows and alders where loosestrife and meadowsweet and willow-herb and yarrow grew tall and thick. There were water-lilies in shady back-waters, and beautiful gardens sloping down to the water. At last the boats came to a pretty little town among trees. "This is where we disembark," said the little girl cousin. "The King lies here to-night at Sir Thomas Bradbury's. And we lie at our grandfather's house. And to-morrow it is the Masque in Sir Thomas's Park. And we are to see it. I am glad thou'st well of thy fever, Richard. I shouldn't have liked it half so well if thou hadn't been here," she said, smiling. And of course that was a very nice thing to have said to one. "And then we go home to Deptford with thee," said the boy cousin. "We are to stay a month. And we'll see thy galleon, and get old Sebastian to make me one too...." "Yes," said Dickie, as the boat came against the quay. "What _is_ this place?" "Gravesend, thou knowest that," said the little cousins, "or hadst thou forgotten that, too, in thy fever?" "Gravesend?" Dickie repeated, in quite a changed voice. "Come, children," said the aunt--oh, what a different aunt to the one who had slapped Dickie in Deptford, sold the rabbit-hutch, and shot the moon!--"you boys remember how I showed you to carry my train. And my girl will not forget how to fling the flowers from the gilt basket as the King and Queen come down the steps." The grandfather's house and garden--the stately, white-haired grandfather, whom they called My Lord, and who was, it seemed, the aunt's father--the banquet, the picture-gallery, the gardens lit up by little colored oil lamps hung in festoons from tree to tree, the blazing torches, the music, the Masque--a sort of play without words in which every one wore the most wonderful and beautiful dresses, and the Queen herself took a part dressed all in gauze and jewels and white swan's feathers--all these things were like a dream to Dickie, and through it all the words kept on saying themselves to him very gently, very quietly, and quite without stopping-- "Gravesend. That's where the lodging-house is where Beale is waiting for you--the man you called father. You promised to go there as soon as you could. Why haven't you gone? Gravesend. That's where the lodging-house is where Beale----" And so on, over and over again.