"You want to know where I come from? But that is easy." The stranger reached out a white hand with a diamond upon it, and Annet yielded the book to her without resisting. "I come from here"—and she tapped the pages mysteriously.
"But how can that be?" demanded Linnet, who was always the matter-of-fact one. "Out of a book! Such things do not happen."
Vashti laughed merrily. "I assure you," she answered, with a glance at the fly-leaf, "I have been in the book all the while you were reading; and," she added, her eyes softening as they rested on the child, "of you three it is Linnet who is most like her mother."
They had not thought of this before, but she had no sooner said it than they knew it to be the truth; and the discovery made her more marvellous than ever.
"Yes," she went on, "I have lived inside this book; and, what is more, I know the man who wrote it."
She looked around on the three faces; and—so strange are children—for the first time in his life Matthew Henry at once asserted himself as a person entirely different from his sisters. For Annet and Linnet merely looked puzzled; to them the book was a book, just as the hill upon which they sat was a hill, and they had never troubled their heads about such a thing as an author. But Matthew Henry opened his infantine eyes still wider.
"Tell us about him," he demanded.
Vashti eyed the child curiously for a moment before answering. "He lives in the north," she said, "in a city where the sea is sometimes frozen for weeks in the winter, and where night after night you may see the Northern Lights over the roofs. That is why he writes so much of snow and fir-trees and cold winters."
Annet nodded. "I have seen the Northern Lights—once—from Saaron here," she announced proudly. "Father took me out of my bed and held me up to the window to look at them; Linnet, too—but she was too young to remember, and Matthew Henry was not even born at the time."
"But tell us," persisted Matthew Henry, "about the man who wrote the book."