It was time to saddle and get home.
They rode back talking of it, and wondering why they hadn’t been able to tell Darthea about Washington. But at last Rose thought she understood.
“You see, where we were, it hadn’t happened yet,” she said. “The fairy took us to the time before Washington had beaten the English and made us a nation, so of course we didn’t remember ... what hadn’t yet happened.”
“But I almost did,” Ruth asserted.
“Think of having been kissed by Washington,” Rose continued. “I guess we’ll never forget that, anyhow.”
And they never did, though they never remembered at the right time to tell Marmie or Dad or anybody else, except once when Rose was talking in her sleep, her mother heard her say something to the effect that she and Ruth were the only little girls in America Washington had ever kissed. When she told Rose about it next morning, the little girl was confused.
“Somehow I think he really did, Marmie ... only I can’t explain,” she said. But Marmie only laughed, calling her a funny little dreamer.
In the summer that followed Rose and Ruth saw no more of the Winter Fairy who had taken them on so many delightful excursions through the Magic Gate. Often they talked of her, and occasionally, just before falling asleep, they thought they caught a faint sound of her voice, almost like moonbeams singing. But of this they could not be quite sure. When they turned the pages of the books in which lived the heroines she had taken them to see, it almost seemed to them at times that she had left the key of that Gate in their hands, and that the story was real to them ... real as the house in which they lived, real as themselves.
But when they told this to their mother she smiled, and said it was imagination, and kissed them.