“And is she living there still?” asked Philomène.
But the merman had forgotten her, and was looking out to sea again. So she rose quietly, and paddled out of the creek; the tide was all but in now, and she ran home barefooted along the yellow sands.
CHAPTER XV
IN WHICH THE TWIN SISTERS TELL A STORY BETWEEN THEM
It was August still, and early evening; an evening of balmy airs and dappled skies. Philomène, bedded in bracken, lay nestling at the foot of a mighty pine-tree on the outskirts of the woods, separated only by a haha from the garden of the Cushats, and the twin fairies were with her. Speedwell was seated in a swinging hammock of green tendrils, in among the undergrowth, and was busy making herself some intricate spider’s web lace, while Spirea, on a fallen pine-cone, stitched away industriously at a dainty patchwork coverlet of sweetpea petals for the bed in the dove-cot.
“I do wonder,” Philomène was saying, “whether my merman knew the merman who was Carey’s godfather. Perhaps they were old friends, like Godmother and my mother, only of course at the bottom of the sea.”
“That reminds me,” said Speedwell, “that neither of us has ever yet told you a story. We seem always to have had so many other things to talk about. Would you like one now?”
“Why, yes, I should, ever so much,” replied Philomène, “and I think I should like it to be about water, and about trees and ferns and mosses, just like these here, if you don’t mind.”
“If it’s a fresh-water story she wants,” observed Spirea, “you might as well tell her the one about the pixie’s nursling.”
“So I might,” said Speedwell, and she began:—
“In the heart of a certain forest there was a deep pool, still and green, where waterlilies rocked in the summer time. Now it happened that a woodcutter had daily to pass this pool as he went to and fro from his work, and one evening as he came by he heard a sweet voice calling to him from the water, saying; “Good master woodcutter, I pray you make me a cradle.” Then, because he was under the spell of the sweet voice, the woodcutter went home and sat up all night, making an oaken cradle.