Peggy had never been to the Island, and when she was playing on the sands she would sometimes look at it, and wonder what it was like there. She could see a little town and a little church, and a few houses scattered about among the hills; and she wondered what sort of people lived in them.
Well, when she was eight years old she found out, and she also got to know a good deal more about the two wooden ladies of the bungalow. What she found out was so remarkable that it is doubtful if any little girl has ever seen anything like it before, and I am going to tell you the story of it.
But before I begin I must say this: that if Peggy had not had a kind heart she would never have found out anything. I do not mean to say that she was never naughty; but she was never naughty in that most horrid of all ways, by being cruel or unkind. She had several pets—two rabbits and four guinea-pigs, a bantam cock and hen, two white pigeons, and a kitten, which she liked best of them all. If she had once been cruel to any of these pets, just to see what they would do, it is quite certain that she would never have been taken to the Island. And if she had made fun of old people or poor people, she would never have gone either, because that is an extremely unkind and horrid thing to do. But Peggy had never done any of these things, because she was a really kind little girl, and if something horrid inside her whispered: “Now, just be a little bit cruel,” she was almost as much ashamed of it as if she had really been cruel, and she never listened to the whisper for a moment. So when she was eight years old she was taken to the Island in the extraordinary way I am going to tell you about.
Peggy had a good number of toys, and amongst them two dolls, which will now engage our attention.
The elder of the two was a wooden doll, which she had had for some time, and the story of this doll is rather interesting.
When Peggy was five years old she had a doll given her called Rose. Rose was well-dressed, in clothes that would come on and off; and rather a nice hat came with her. But somehow Peggy could not get to like her much. She took her about everywhere for quite a week, undressed her every night and dressed her again every morning, and sometimes gave her a bath, but not with water in it, because her body was stuffed, although her head was composition. She also took her out in the new pram that had been given to her at the same time, and put up the hood if it was sunny. In fact she did everything that a nice little girl could to make Rose feel that she had come to a kind and loving home.
But at the end of a week she didn’t feel that Rose really loved her. Most little girls know dolls like that. You may do all you can for them, and they don’t seem to appreciate it at all. Well, Rose was one of those dolls.
One morning Peggy went out with her nurse, and took Rose with her in the pram. They went down through the village, and along the road on the other side, and presently they came to a cottage where a lot of children lived. Their mother was not very kind to them, and so they were not very kind to each other, but were always fighting and squabbling.
One of these children was a girl a year older than Peggy, called Mabel, and just as Peggy and her nurse came up to the cottage they saw Mabel banging the head of an old wooden doll on the hard road.