"Oh, I s'pose she'd go crazy distracted; but she isn't coming home, not a long time isn't she coming home; that's why I comed away, and I runned away, and I said—what makes you look like that, dwarf?"
"I suppose I ought to send you home, Snow-white. I suppose you ought to go this very day, don't you?"
He stopped abruptly, for the signs were ominous; the child's lower lip was going up in the middle and coming down at the corners; her eyes were growing wider and wider, rounder and rounder; now they began to glitter.
"Don't cry!" said the man, hastily. "Don't cry, Snow-white. The other Snow-white never cried, you know."
The child sniffed tearfully. "The other Snow-white never was treated so!" she said. "Never those dwarfs tried to send her away, never. She cooked their dinner, and she swept, and they liked her, and they never said noffin, and—I haven't any hanky!" she concluded suddenly, after a vain search in her pink calico pocket.
The man handed her a great square of white cobweb linen, and she dried her eyes. "Never I heard of dwarfs sending children away!" she said, in conclusion. "I don't believe p'r'aps you aren't the right kind. Is you got any name? Not ever dwarfs has names."
"I'm afraid I have a kind of name!" the man admitted. "But it isn't much of one. You might call me Mark, though, if you like."
"That isn't no name at all. It's just you do it wiz a pencil. Aren't you funny? Truly is it your name? What made you have such a name?"
But the man declared he had lost his way in the questions. "I haven't begun on this morning's yet," he protested, "and now you are asking me to-morrow's, Snow-white. But we must do the dishes now, and then I'll show you where I slept last night. You asked me that the very first thing this morning, and you have not been still long enough yet for me to tell you."
That would be great! the child thought. On the whole, she thought perhaps he was the right kind of dwarf, after all. Why did he have a hump on his back, though? not in the Snow-white picture they did. Wasn't it funny, when she stood on the cricket she was just as tall as he? Wasn't that nice? wasn't he glad he wasn't any taller? didn't he think he was made that way just for little girls? did ever he see any little girls before? did he think she looked like Snow-white? why didn't he talk when she spoke to him?