“You can see the Winter Palace from the window here, when there isn’t any frost on it,” proceeded the “princess,” setting up a volcanic disturbance inside the patchwork mountain by turning herself inside of it, and she pointed toward one of the bay windows with a thin white hand. “It’s on top of a high hill and at night it twinkles.”
It came over Katherine in a flash that possibly it was Nyoda’s house that this queer child meant by the “Winter Palace.” A big house set on a high hill——
A rippling laugh caused her to look down hastily, and there was the girl on the couch fairy convulsed with laughter.
“It’s been such fun!” she exclaimed, demolishing the mountain by throwing the quilt aside with a sudden movement of her arms and disclosing a slender little body wrapped in a grayish woolen dressing gown. “I never had anybody from outside to play it with before. I get tired playing it alone so much, and Aunt Aggie is mostly always too busy to play it with me. Besides,” she said with a regretful sigh, “she has no imagination, and she forgets most of the really important things. Oh, it was wonderful when you said, ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Your Majesty?’ It was just as real as real!” She laughed with delight at the remembrance.
Katherine, as much startled by the swift change in her little hostess as she had been at her strange manner of speech in the beginning, was still uncertain what to say. “Is it a game?” she asked finally.
The girl nodded and began to explain, talking as though to an old friend.
“You see,” she began, “not being able to walk, it’s so hard to find anything really thrilling to do.”
“You are lame?” asked Katherine with quick sympathy. It had just come over her that while the slender arms had been waving incessantly in animated gestures as the voice chattered gaily on, the limbs under the dressing gown had not moved.
The girl nodded in reply to Katherine’s question. “Crippled,” she explained. “I was following a horse down the middle of the street trying to figure out which leg came after which when I slipped and fell and hurt my spine, and I have never walked since.”
“Oh-h!” said Katherine with a shudder of distress.