Tania held long conversations with these birds in the mornings and in the late afternoons. She told them all her troubles, and how very much she would like to get away from the place where she was now staying. However, the birds were great gad-abouts during the day, and Tania could hardly blame them.
There was one fat, fatherly robin that became Tania’s particular friend. He used to hop about near her window and nod and chirp to her as though to reassure her. “Your friends will come for you to-day, I am quite sure of it,” he used to say, until one day Tania really spoke aloud to him and was startled at the sound of her own voice.
“I don’t believe you are a robin at all,” she announced. “I just believe you are a nice, fat father of a whole lot of funny little boys and girls. I believe you are enchanted, like me. Oh, dear! I was just beginning to believe that I wasn’t a fairy after all but a real little girl with pretty clothes and friends to kiss me good night.” Tania sighed. “I suppose I must be a fairy princess after all, for if I was a real little girl no one would have cast another wicked spell over me and shut me up in this dungeon in the woods, which is a whole lot worse than living with old Sal.”
Yet playing and pretending, and, worse than anything, waiting, grew very tiresome to Tania. On the morning of the fourth day of her imprisonment Tania awoke with a start. Something had knocked on her window pane. It was only the old cedar tree, and Tania turned over in bed with a sob. But the tapping went on. She got up and went to her window. Quick as a flash Tania made up her mind to run away. Why had she never thought of it before? It was true, her bedroom door was always locked, but here were the branches of the cedar tree reaching close up to her window. Really, this morning they seemed to speak quite distinctly to Tania:
“Why in the world don’t you come to me? I shall hold you quite safe! You can climb down through all my arms to the warm earth and then run away to your friends.”
It was just after dawn. The pink sky was showing against the earlier grayness when Tania slipped into her coarse clothes and, like a small elf, crept out of her window into the friendly branches of the old tree. She was silent and swift as a squirrel as she clambered down. But she need not have feared. No one in the lonely country place was awake but the child.
Once on the ground, Tania ran on and on, without thinking where she was going. She only wished to get far away from the dreary house where Philip Holt had hidden her. There was a thick woods about a mile or so from Tania’s starting place. No one would find her there. Once she was through it Tania hoped to find a town, or at least a farm, where she could ask for help. In spite of her queer, unchildlike ways, Tania knew enough to understand that if she could only find some one to telegraph to her friends they would soon come to her.
But the forest through which Tania hoped to pass was a dreadful cedar swamp, and in trying to cross it Tania wandered far into it and found herself hopelessly lost.