"If we went to him and suddenly tore his coat off," said she "he is only coats he couldn't go on being real then.
"Couldn't he!" said Gerald. "You don't know what he's like under the coat."
Kathleen shivered again. And all this time the sun was shining gaily and the white statues and the green trees and the fountains and terraces looked as cheerfully romantic as a scene in a play.
"Anyway," said Gerald, "we'll try to get him back, and shut the door. That's the most we can hope for. And then apples, and Robinson Crusoe or the Swiss Family, or any book you like that's got no magic in it. Now, we've just got to do it. And he's not horrid now; really he isn't. He's real, you see."
"I suppose that makes all the difference," said Mabel, and tried to feel that perhaps it did.
"And it's broad daylight just look at the sun," Gerald insisted.
"Come on!"
He took a hand of each, and they walked resolutely towards the bank of rhododendrons behind which Jimmy and the Ugly-Wugly had been told to wait, and as they went Gerald said: "He's real" "The sun's shining" "It'll all be over in a minute." And he said these things again and again, so that there should be no mistake about them.
As they neared the bushes the shining leaves rustled, shivered, and parted, and before the girls had time to begin to hang back Jimmy came blinking out into the sunlight. The boughs closed behind him, and they did not stir or rustle for the appearance of anyone else. Jimmy was alone.
"Where is it?" asked the girls in one breath.
"Walking up and down in a fir-walk," said Jimmy, "doing sums in a book. He says he's most frightfully rich, and he's got to get up to town to the Stocks or something where they change papers into gold if you're clever, he says. I should like to go to the Stocks-change, wouldn't you?"