Whilst he was impressing this upon Gerna, who was getting over her fear of the little Brown Man, she remembered the mottled purse in her pocket, and was on the point of telling him, when a great voice roared out over the bay, and, on looking round, she saw a man called Farmer Vivian coming across the bar.
The great voice, or Farmer Vivian himself, she did not know which, so frightened the Brown Piskey Man that he took to his heels, and in less than a minute he and all the other Little Men had vanished into their cavern.
Gerna was on the point of following him thither, for she was almost certain that the mottled purse she had found was the one they had lost, when a great wave broke over the rock where she was standing, and nearly knocked her down, and she had to run away from the cavern to escape another wave.
As she turned to go back to her limpet-picking, she found the limpet rocks were all covered with the incoming tide; her basket, poised high on a breaker and upside down, was fortunately thrown in on the sands at her feet.
‘Great-Grannie will be terribly put out,’ she told herself as she went home, ‘and the poor little ducklings will have to go without supper.’
The ancient dame was even more vexed than Gerna thought she would be, and sent her at once to bed, and Gelert had to sit on the hedge alone to watch the Piskeys dancing; but they never appeared on the headland, for all his watching.
As Gerna was undressing, the pocket under her frock began to twitch and shake as if it had St. Vitus’s dance. As she hastened to untie it, the little voice she had heard in the mottled purse before the Wee Men came out of the cavern spoke to her again.
‘Please take me out of your pocket; I want so much to talk to you.’
The child, though somewhat afraid, did so, and held the bag carefully in her hand.
‘I cannot tell you how thankful I feel that you did not take me to Piskey Goog, as that little Brown Man asked you to do.’