A few days after Ninnie-Dinnie had brought the pailful of sunbeams, she again asked to go with Tom over the moors, and Tom willingly took her.
‘What impossible thing is Mammie Trebisken going to ask you to bring back to-day?’ said the miner in joke as the child went to the dresser for the Pail.
‘The only thing I should like to have brought home to me to-day is that nasty little Skavarnak which frightened my Ninnie-Dinnie,’ said Joan. ‘If she do catch un an’ bring un home in the Pail, I won’t be willing to let him get out of it again in a hurry!’
‘Do you really want the Little Long-Eared?’ asked the child, with a curious look in her eyes.
‘Of course I do. I s’pose he won’t be so easy to get into the Pail as the lark’s music or the pool’s sunbeams.’
‘Not nearly so easy,’ responded Ninnie-Dinnie. ‘And even if I can get him into the Pail, you won’t like to keep him, and you must until——’
She did not finish what she was going to say, as Tom was in a hurry to be off, and they left the invalid greatly wondering whatever the little maid could mean.
The sun was rising when Tom and his little foster-child reached a part of the great moor where a road turned towards Ding Dong, and where they saw a hare sitting on his haunches cleaning his whiskers.
‘There is Mister Long-Eared,’ whispered Tom. ‘Now is your chance to catch him, my dear;’ but the hare had heard the whisper, and he vanished under the bracken.
‘He will be very difficult to get into the Pail,’ sighed Ninnie-Dinnie. ‘But he will have to go into it, or the spell won’t be broken.’