The glorious hues were fading fast from the sky now, and the sun shone with the pale clear light of early morning. The sea still sparkled, and the birds sang, but the children paid little heed to either; they were too hungry and tired. The walk home was rather a silent one, and they got into the house so easily that there was no excitement there to arouse them. With scarcely a word they quietly separated, slipped off their things and crept into their beds again, and, fortunately for them, soon fell asleep and forgot their hunger.
“Well, I never! What a sleepy-head!” cried Bessie some time later. “What’s the matter with you both, I wonder? I had to strip the bed-clothes off Aaron and pull away his pillows before I could rouse him, and here are you, Miss Loveday, pretty nearly as bad. Come along, jump up! Here’s your bath, and breakfast will be ready in half-an-hour. You won’t go to sleep again, will you, dear?”
“No-o,” said Loveday, in a very, very drowsy voice, “but I—I think you’d better lift me out, Bessie, or—p’r’aps—I may——”
And Bessie took her at her word, and lifted her right out of her snug little bed and stood her on the floor.
But more than once that day Bessie looked at them both with a puzzled face. “I don’t know when I’ve seen them look so tired,” she said to herself. “I s’pose it’s the weather.” And later in the day, when she went to call them in to tea, and found Loveday curled up on the sand, sound asleep, her spade and bucket lying beside her—and Aaron fast asleep too, his book fallen out of his hand—she looked puzzled again, and rather troubled. “It can’t be anything but the weather, I should think,” she murmured; “I don’t think they can be sickening for anything, they ain’t a bit feverish, and their appetites are good.” And after their nap and their tea they were so bright and lively again, that Bessie’s fears all vanished, and the weather was, as usual, blamed unjustly.
“I wonder,” Loveday whispered many times during the day—“I wonder what Mr. Winter thought when he saw what we’d done? I wonder if he saw it, and if he was very, very glad? Do you think he would think about piskies, and guess that they did it?”
“I dunno,” said Aaron stolidly. “I reckon he don’t put down nothing for fairies and such-like; but there isn’t nobody else that could do it.”
That night they took care to hide some of their supper in their pockets for the morning. Aaron was not quite so excited about the pisky plan as he had been, but Loveday was full of it; the thought of what they had done and of Mr. Winter’s pleasure gave her fresh zeal and energy. She longed for the next morning to come, that she might look again on what they had done, and work more wonders. This time she determined that they really would try to make the garden near the house look neater; they would not shirk it a second time, but would really begin to work at it at once, and give all their time and attention to it. Again she slept in her clothes, and again she called Aaron very early. This morning, though, there was no glorious sunrise to cheer or delay them; the dawn was grey and chilly; a wet sea-fog hung over everything, making it damp and dull. No birds sang to-day. As the children mounted the cliff, the world below seemed cut off from them, and they themselves might have been in cloudland.
“Now it really does seem as though we had walked into the sky,” said Loveday. “I am glad Priscilla isn’t here; she would be frightened, I expect, but of course I know all about it.”
Though they had no sunshine or beauty to gaze at, they had bread to eat, and that helped to keep up their spirits and their energies.