"Quick," he cried, "I can't wait! They may go again. Show me how to use them. Oh! do show me."
"I'll show you everything in time," she answered. There was something in her voice that made him pause in his excitement. He looked at her in silence for some minutes.
"But how are you going to escape?" he asked at length. "You haven't got"——he stopped short.
The governess stepped back a few paces from him. She threw back the hood from her face. Then she lifted the long black cloak that hung like a cassock almost to her ankles and had always enveloped her hitherto.
Jimbo stared. Falling from her shoulders, and folding over her hips, he saw long red feathers clinging to her; and when he dashed forward to touch them with his hands, he found they were just as sleek and smooth and glossy as his own.
"And you never told me all this time?" he gasped.
"It was safer not," she said. "You'd have been stroking and feeling your shoulders the whole time, and the wings might never have come at all."
She spread out her wings as she spoke to their full extent; they were nearly six feet across, and the deep crimson on the under side was so exquisite, gleaming in the sunlight, that Jimbo ran in and nestled beneath the feathers, tickling his cheeks with the fluffy surface and running his fingers with childish delight along the slender red quills.