Next eve came a second old woman, uglier, if possible, than the last, and bent like some brutish beast. She had the same story to tell him of bygone loveliness, and Guido sped her down the hill with even more haste than before.
The next night a third old woman appeared, so dread of aspect that he was obliged to avert his gaze. Against his wish, he felt himself constrained to enquire the cause of her terrible affliction.
‘I sat at my wheel, good master,’ was the reply, ‘until beauty and sight both left me, and my skin became even as you see.’
Now thoroughly alarmed, he dismissed her quickly with a handful of coins, and calling Pepita to him, gazed at her long and searchingly. When the flush that his now unaccustomed touch had brought to her sweet face faded, he saw she was pale and thin. Her mouth drooped sadly, and purple shadows brooded round her eyes. With a cry of remorse he drew her to his breast, and kissed her tenderly.
‘You shall spin no longer, my Pepita,’ he said, ‘for I would rather have you as you are than be rich as Satan himself!’”
And this was the very last story I heard. We started for home next morning, and I went to school at the half term—a ripping school where there was any amount of cricket, and so many other games that I had no time to think of Fairies.
But some day I’m going to find the Peri, and those other wonderful Sprites and Goblins of which Titania told me when I met her in the wood that Christmas day.
Printed by W. W. Curtis, Ltd., Cheylesmore Press, Coventry.