As Kate read now, the conversation between Elsie and Bertha in the next room was a humming undertone to her thoughts. She could not have caught their words if she had listened. But she had no inclination to listen. She was moving in a world where quarrels and bitter feelings were an impossibility. She was seeing things through the eyes of the King of the Fairies. She was in the meadows that she knew at home, feeling the larger life there that the King of the Fairies had made known to her. She was standing, tall, in the body of an elm tree, spreading with its leaves to the sun, feeling with its roots into the vibrating ground.
Suddenly a voice came to her. It was a long way she rushed back to find the voice. Bertha was standing beside her bed.
“Shall I turn out your light, Miss Kate? Or do you wish to read?”
Kate did not know that Bertha had come into the room at all. Elsie’s light was out, and if the doors through must be left open, Kate’s light would disturb her. Of course she must put out her light and try to sleep. She was on the verge of saying, “I will put out my own light, thanks,” but the meadow from which she had rushed back had, oddly enough as some might think, put her into more perfect harmony with her own restricted four walls. So she said, “You may put the light out, thank you.” And she did not even smile to herself when Bertha bent over the table and pulled at the little chain that was much nearer Kate’s reach than hers. She accepted the service naturally, since such acceptance was Aunt Katherine’s wish and the purpose of Bertha’s presence here.
“Good-night,” Bertha spoke out of the sudden darkness.
“Good-night,” Kate answered. Then soft footfalls, and she was alone in the room.
But though “The King of the Fairies” had done a good deal for Kate it had not had time to do enough to make her call a “good-night” to Elsie. Suppose Aunt Katherine knew the two girls were going to sleep without a word to each other!
From her bed, now that the room was dark, Kate could see the dim apple orchard under starlight. She rose on her elbow and strained her eyes for the outlines of the little orchard house. She found it by hard looking. How mysterious, how lonely, still how alive out there it stood. And she had heard a door close softly, just as though a door knob had turned as they stood below those open back windows. And why were those windows open? Elsie knew, Kate was sure. The little orchard house harboured some secret of Elsie’s.
But what was that! Kate sat up in bed and bent toward the window, her eyes straining. A light, flickering, was moving down through the house! Kate watched it as it went by several windows, breathless. Soon it disappeared altogether, and a second after Kate thought she heard the front door of the little orchard house softly closing, or opening; but that must have been fancy, for the orchard house was much too far away for a sound of that quality to carry to her.
As she curled down into bed again her eyes crinkled with her smile in the darkness. Well, here was mystery. She would write Sam and Lee that she would save their mystery story for duller times. Now she was living in one!