“What have you done with him then?” said Mrs. Roberts. “Come out, you little rascal, directly in a minute.”
There was no little rascal to come out, and Margaret Roberts, the girl, said that Johnnie had not come across the road with them: he must be still playing all by himself by the hedge.
“What did you let him stay like that for?” said Mrs. Roberts. “Can’t I trust you for two minutes together? Indeed to goodness, you are all of you more trouble than you are worth.” She went to the open door:
“Johnnie! Come you in directly, or you will be sorry for it. Johnnie!”
The poor woman called at the door. She went out to the gate and called there:
“Come you, little Johnnie. Come you, bachgen, there’s a good boy. I do see you hiding there.”
She thought he must be hiding in the shadow of the hedge, and that he would come running and laughing—“he was always such a happy little fellow”—to her across the road. But no little merry figure danced out of the gloom of the still, dark night; it was all silence.
It was then, as the mother’s heart began to chill, though she still called cheerfully to the missing child, that the elder boy told how Johnnie had said there was something beautiful by the stile: “and perhaps he did climb over, and he is running now about the meadow, and has lost his way.”
The father got his lantern then, and the whole family went crying and calling about the meadow, promising cakes and sweets and a fine toy to poor Johnnie if he would come to them.
They found the little body, under the ashgrove in the middle of the field. He was quite still and dead, so still that a great moth had settled on his forehead, fluttering away when they lifted him up.