“I don’t know; I never heard of anybody hereabouts seeing them. Perhaps they don’t come to these parts now.”
“I don’t think they do, or they would tidy Mr. Winter’s garden for him and weed his path. It is very untidy, isn’t it? It looks just like a place no one lives in.”
Aaron nodded; he had never seen it in any other condition, so was not so much impressed as was Loveday.
“I wish I could make it nice for him. I’d like to make it look so nice—all in one night—that when he came out he’d be—oh! ever so s’prised, and he’d wonder and wonder who had done it, and he’d say: ‘Why, a fairy must have been here at work.’ That’s what father and mother say sometimes.”
Aaron looked at her with interest. He liked to hear her stories of her home, and what she did there. Some of them were very wonderful. But Loveday had no stories to tell that afternoon; she was very thoughtful and quiet, and sat for quite a long time without speaking. Aaron began at last to grow tired of staying still, and was just about to get up, when she suddenly turned to him, all excitement:
“I’ve been thinking, and I’ve thought of—oh, ever such a nice plan. Let’s play that we are piskies, and come up in the night and tidy Mr. Winter’s garden for him, and make him think it is a fairy that has done it, and—and then we’d come again, and he’d think the fairies had been again. Shall we, Aaron? Oh, do say yes; and it will be a secret, and nobody must ever know, and everybody will wonder—and oh, it will be simply, simply splendid.”
Aaron listened eagerly, quite carried away by her enthusiasm. Loveday, with her ideas, her wild plans, and strange thoughts, was a constant wonder to him, and where she led he followed—if he could.
“Won’t all the folks be wondering and talking when it gets about?” he cried excitedly, “and won’t it be funny to be listening to them, and we knowing all the time all ’bout it! Oh, it’ll be grand!”
For quite a long while they sat and discussed their plans delightedly, and of course there were a great many plans to be made. Aaron it was who first saw difficulties in the way of carrying them out.
“But how’re we going to get out in the night?” he cried. “Mother and father would hear us. ’Twould be dark, too, and if we was to slip and fall climbing up the cliff, we’d be killed as dead as—as dead as pilchards.”