“I can see,” cried the child, springing up and scattering a shower of blossoms from the folds of her frock which fell into the water, disturbing it till it looked like a shattered mirror. “No, not now, naughty thing that I am, to make the poor brook so angry with my flowers—but wait a minute, and you shall see!”
“No, no, not there!” cried I, seizing her in breathless fear, for I remembered the hideous thing that had frightened me from the depths of those very waters; “don’t look in the water; let us go away. It may be lurking here yet.”
“What?” questioned the child, anxiously.
“Something that I saw here once, a wild, wicked creature, with such eyes and hair”——
“What, in the water?” she asked, her blue eyes growing wider and larger.
“Yes, here in the pool, just by this rock.”
We both stood up clinging to one another. In our upright position the pool lay clear and tranquil beneath us, and impelled by that sort of fascination which in moments of affright often turns the gaze upon that which it dreads to see, our eyes fell at the same moment upon two objects reflected back as from a mirror—my little friend, so like one of those cherubs which Raphael half buries amid the transparent clouds in his pictures—and that other little friend, with whom I had become acquainted in the mirror at home.
“Ah, how came she here? Is she your friend also?” I said, pointing toward the dark brilliant child that pointed back to me, with a questioning smile as I spoke.
“Who, that?” asked my companion, waving her hand—a gesture that was sent back, as it seemed, with new grace from the water.
“Why, don’t you know it again?”