So I took up the Rushlight and went as fast as I could.
I met a black beetle on the back stairs, which was horrid, but I went on. The side door key is very rusty and very stiff; I had to put down the Rushlight and use both my hands, and just then the clock struck the half-hour, which was rather a good thing, for it drowned the noise of the lock. It did not take me two minutes to run down the grass path, and there were the Sunflowers.
I did it and it can't be undone, but I don't know what I wanted to know after all, for the moon was shining in their faces, so they may not have been really sound asleep. They are so tall, the Rushlight was too heavy for me to lift right up, so I opened the door and took out the candle, and flashed it in their faces. But they did not take as much notice as I expected. Their glory leaves looked rather narrow and tight, but they were not quite like the flower-women in the picture.
Sunflowers are alive, I know; they look so different when they are dead. And I am sure they go to sleep, and wake up with candles, or Dr. Brown would not have said so. But it is rather a quiet kind of being alive and awake, I think. Something like Grandmamma, when she is very stiff on Sunday afternoon, and goes to sleep upright in a chair, and wakes up a little when her book drops. But not alive and awake like Margery's black cat, which must have heard me open the side door, and followed me without my seeing it. It did frighten me, with jumping out of the bushes, and looking at me with yellow eyes!
Then I saw another eye. The eye of a moth, who was on one of the leaves. A most beautiful fellow! His colored wings were rather tight, like the Sunflower's glory leaves, but he was wide awake—watching the candle.
I should have got back to bed quicker if it had not been for Margery's black cat and the night-moths. I wanted to get the cat into the house again, but she would not follow me, and the moths would; and I had such hard work to keep them out of the Rushlight.
There was nothing to drown the noise the key made when I locked the side-door again, and when I got to the bottom of the back stairs, I saw a light at the top, and there was Grandmamma in the most awful night cap you can imagine, with a candle in one hand, and the watchman's rattle in the other.
CHAPTER IV.
HEADS OFF! JAEL AND MASTER JOHN. FAREWELL. FRIEND IN NEED. A FREE PARDON.
The worst of it was, I caught such a very bad cold, I gave more trouble than ever; besides Grandmamma having rheumatism in her back with the draught up the back stairs, and nothing on but her night things and the watchman's rattle. I knew I deserved to be punished, but I did not think my punishment would have been such a terrible one.