“Olive——” he began, but Olive interrupted him.
“Rex,” she said eagerly, “that’s exactly like them—like the blue dwarfs, I mean. Only, of course, their faces were prettier—nice little china faces, rather crumply looking, but quite nice; and then their coats were such a pretty nice blue. I think,” she went on consideringly—“I think if I had that little man and washed his face very well, and got him a bright blue coat, he would look just like one of the blue dwarfs grown big.”
Rex looked at Olive with a queer expression.
“Olive,” he said in rather an awe-struck tone; “Olive, do you think perhaps they’re real? Do you think perhaps somewhere in this country—in those queer dark woods, perhaps—that there are real blue dwarfs, and that somebody must have seen them and made the little china ones like them? Perhaps,” and his voice dropped and grew still more solemn; “perhaps, Olive, that little man’s one of them, and they may have to take off their blue coats when they’re walking about. Do you know, I think it’s a little, just a very little frightening? Don’t you, Olive?”
“No, of course I don’t,” said Olive, and, to do her justice, her rather sharp answer was meant as much to reassure her little brother as to express any feeling of impatience. Rex was quite a little fellow, only eight, and Olive, who was nearly twelve, remembered that when she was as little as that, she used sometimes to feel frightened about things which she now couldn’t see anything the least frightening in. And she remembered how once or twice some of her big cousins had laughed at her, and amused themselves by telling her all sorts of nonsense, which still seemed terrible to her when she was alone in her room in the dark at night. “Of course there’s nothing frightening in it,” she said. “It would be rather a funny idea, I think. Of course it can’t be, you know, Rex. There are no dwarfs, and gnomes, and fairies now.”
“But that little man was a dwarf,” said Rex.
“Yes, but a dwarf needn’t be a fairy sort of person,” explained Olive. “He’s just a common little man, only he’s never grown as big as other people. Perhaps he had a bad fall when he was a baby—that might stop his growing.”
“Would it?” said Rex. “I didn’t know that. I hope I hadn’t a bad fall when I was a baby. Everybody says I’m very small for my age.” And Rex looked with concern at his short but sturdy legs.
Olive laughed outright.