“Tommy!” Muffs called. “Can you really see the trail through those glasses?”
“I can see it through the glasses,” he called back, “but when I look again, it’s gone.”
“Then we are lost!” Mary cried. “I knew it! Tommy had no right to take the lead.” And she began to cry.
Muffs felt like crying, too. Night made her think of her own little bed back in the studio. Her mother was always there, just outside the screen. Muffs had only to peep through a crack to see her working away at her painting. Perhaps it would be a painted woods as green as the one they had just passed through, or a sky as bright as their sky had been before the sun sank in a pool of red clouds. She thought of all this and then remembered that, for the first time in her life, she would have to go to sleep without her mother’s kiss. There would be no green and gold screen, no little bed, not even a blanket ...
“I s’pose we’ll have to cover up in leaves like the babes in the woods,” she said, her lip trembling.
Mary did not answer. She stood watching the trees grow darker and darker as the last red cloud was swallowed up by the hill. Tommy headed for the valley.
“We’re bound to come out somewhere,” he said hopefully.
“We are not,” Mary sobbed. “Lost people just keep going ’round and ’round in circles.”
“Then we aren’t lost,” Tommy declared. “We haven’t passed the same thing once and we’ve had a Guide to lead us all the way.”
Too tired to argue, Mary nodded and her hand tightened on Muffins’ arm. The air felt chilly and a wind was whistling overhead in the branches. Louder than Tommy’s whistle sounded its ooo-ooo! Louder than their voices when they called! Did the wind always make such a noise, Muffs wondered. Was that a light ahead of them or only a star showing through the trees?