“We’ll drive him off,” said the owl-faced being.
“But he’ll cry,” said Kitty uncomfortably.
“Just put a small piece of this cotton-wool into your ear,” suggested her new acquaintance, offering her some that he drew out of his breast-pocket.
Kitty took a morsel hesitatingly and put it into her right ear; the naughty sprite extended its paw, took a larger bit, and clapped it into her left ear.
At first Kitty thought she had grown quite deaf—a great silence seemed to close around her, yet she heard the swish of the trees and the song of the birds; but some sound was missing, some sound that she was accustomed to hear. Then she knew that there had been ever present a murmur in her ear, as that of other children weeping, other children laughing.
It was this little throbbing music, sad and gay, that she no longer heard. Through the silence the naughty sprite in her own voice cried: “I want to swing in this mossy seat, in the place of that ugly, sick-looking child.”
So lovely appeared that sheltered nook, so aggravatingly comfortable the pale child, that Kitty set off at a run. As she ran she shivered; as if winter had suddenly overtaken her on that sunshiny day.
What was it? Colder and colder, like a chain of ice round her throat. Kitty put up her hands to feel what was there. The naughty sprite was hugging her close.
She stopped running. Where was the guardian child? She could see it nowhere. Could the spectacles be blinding her to the sight of its sweet face? She tried to take them off; but they seemed to have become part of her nose.
Pull, pull went Kitty. At last, with a wrench that seemed to root up her nose, she detached them and threw them a long way off.