Charlotte walked about until she felt tired, then she sat down on one of the many seats to rest until it was time to return home. Children were running about everywhere. Charlotte loved children. Many an afternoon had she gone into Kensington Gardens for the mere and sole purpose of watching them. Here were children, too, as many as there, but of a different class. Not quite so aristocratic, not quite so exclusively belonging to the world of rank and fashion. The children in Regent's Park were certainly quite as well dressed; but there was just some little indescribable thing missing in them, which the little creatures, whom Charlotte Harman was most accustomed to notice, possessed. She was commenting on this, in that vague and slight way one does when all their deepest thoughts are elsewhere, when a man came near and shared her seat. He was a tall man, very slight, very thin. Charlotte, just glancing at him took in this much also, that he was a clergyman. He sat down to rest, evidently doing so from great fatigue. Selfish in her happiness, Charlotte presently returned to her golden dreams. The children came on fast, group after group; some pale and thin, some rosy and healthy; a few scantily clothed, a few overladen with finery. They laughed and scampered past her. For, be the circumstances what they might, all the little hearts seemed full of mirth and sweet content. At last a very small nurse appeared, wheeling a perambulator, while two children ran by her side. These children were dressed neatly, but with no attempt at fashion. The baby in the shabby perambulator was very beautiful. The little group were walking past rather more slowly than most of the other groups, for the older boy and girl looked decidedly tired, when suddenly they all stopped; the servant girl opened her mouth until it remained fixed in the form of a round O; the baby raised its arms and crowed; the elder boy and girl uttered a glad shout and ran forward. "Father, father, you here?" said the boy. "You here?" echoed the girl, and the whole cavalcade drew up in front of Charlotte and the thin clergyman. The boy in an instant was on his father's knee, and the girl, helping herself mightily by Charlotte's dress, had got on the bench. The baby seeing this began to cry. The small nurse seemed incapable of action, and Charlotte herself had to come to the rescue. She lifted the little seven months old creature out of its carriage, and placed it in its father's arms. He raised his eyes gratefully to her face and placed his arm round the baby. "Oh! I'm falling," said the girl. "This seat is so slippy, may I sit on your knee?" It seemed the most natural thing in the world for Charlotte to take this strange, shabbily dressed little girl into her embrace. The child began to stroke down and admire her soft furs. "Aren't they lovely?" she said. "Oh, Harold, look! Feel 'em, Harold; they're like pussies."