'I should like that some other time,' said Fina, 'but just now, perhaps, you'd better get me a doll.'
And a doll lay at her feet among the dead leaves. It was a farthing Dutch doll.
'You didn't say what sort of a doll,' said the footman, when she had rubbed the ring and he had reappeared, and she had reproached him. 'I've been in service long enough to do exactly what I am told. My life-sorrow has been——'
'I say,' Fina said suddenly, 'can't you get the pagoda back for me?'
Instantly the pagoda was there and the footman was not. Fina spent the afternoon playing with the beautiful ivory toy, but when it was tea-time she had to ask the genie footman to take it away again, for she dared not face the questions and she could not invent the explanations that would have followed if she had turned up at the house with the pagoda under her arm.
You will think that Fina ought to have been the happiest of little girls, now that she had a genie footman Slave of the Ring in a green coat to get her anything she wanted, and run her errands on his beautiful balustrade-like white silk legs. But this was not so.
It was all very well to go into the wood every day and make the footman fetch her the most beautiful dolls and toys and sweets, but even sweets are dull if you eat them alone; and what is the use of toys, or even pagodas, if you have no one to show them to, and dare not have them except in a secret corner of the wood?
She tried to get the footman to play with her, but he said that was a little more than anyone could expect, and began again about his sorrows; and as for getting him to take any interest in the wonderful things he fetched for her, she felt at once that these were nothing to a genie footman with such a jewelled and exciting past as his.
She was not a very clever little girl. She wished for a white pony, and, of course, it came, but there was no room for it in the wood, and it walked on her foot and tried to bite her, and she hastily had to send it away. She wished for a pet lamb, but it baaed so loudly that she was almost discovered by the farmer, so that had to go too. And she had been wishing for these vain and unsatisfying things for more than a week before she thought of asking for a little girl to play with.
