Then Elsie floated away, and was lost to Kate in the garden shadows, like a fairyish thing herself.
Kate started up. Had she dreamed Elsie’s coming back, and her words? She had been in such a different state of mind trying to see as the King of the Fairies saw, that she hardly knew. Anyway, big girl of fifteen that she was, she began looking again toward the orchard house with deepened expectancy.
CHAPTER X
IN THE MIRROR
If Elsie had thought to tease or bewilder Kate in the garden last night by asserting that fairies actually had something to do with the orchard house she would have been disappointed now if she could read Kate’s mind as she lay awake in the early morning. A sense of something exciting in the day had waked her before dawn. The excitement, of course, was the party frock that Aunt Katherine had promised her, and “The Blue Bird.”
“I can hardly believe that I am going to have such a wonderful day,” she thought. “Is it really happening to me? Will the morning ever come?”
She had no idea what time it was but she could see that the sky was beginning to lighten. She felt that she could never go to sleep again and she felt very hungry. Ah-ha! She remembered the gingerbread man under her pillow. She had put it there simply to hide it and meaning to get rid of it somehow without Elsie or Bertha seeing. She had not thought she would ever want to eat it! It was too childish. But now she pulled it out, and leaning up on her elbow ate every last crumb.
This elbow position brought the orchard into her view, or rather its growing outlines in the approaching dawn. She recalled last night and Elsie’s emphatic assurance that fairies somehow had a hand in the mystery. Perhaps most other girls of fifteen would simply have laughed at Elsie and not for an instant accepted it as a possibility, fairies not entering into their scheme of things. But fairies did enter into Kate’s scheme of things and always had. There she was different. But there was a reason for her difference.
When she was a little girl of seven she had seen what she thought was a fairy; and it had made such an impression on her mind that when she grew older and came to the age of doubt she simply went on knowing. She had seen what she had seen, and that was all there was to it. Moreover, her mother had seen it, too, or something like it. It was hardly likely that both of them could have been utterly deceived.
It happened when she and Katherine had gone for a walk on a June Saturday. They started very early in the morning and walked very far, for a seven-year-old. But it was Saturday and they were both free, Kate from the lessons which her mother set her, and Katherine from teaching. And it was June. So they did not seem to get tired a bit, but walked and walked, and explored. Toward noon they came to a high meadow hilltop. There they lay down, flat on their backs among the Queen Anne’s lace, buttercups, and daisies, their arms across their eyes, their faces turned directly up toward the sun. It was luncheon time, but they did not care. The sunshine soaking into them and the smell of warm grass and earth were better than food.
They lay still for a long time, not even speaking to each other. Perhaps the little Kate slept. And they thought of getting up and starting for home only when the sun in the sky told Katherine that it must be past two o’clock.