There could be no doubt about his being glad to see Rosalind. He asked how she was, over and over, and apologized for his hands, and smiled and nodded and indulged in all sorts of absurd gestures, which made her laugh so she couldn't try her new accomplishment of talking on her fingers. Directly he hurried into the house, where she could hear him washing his hands, and then he came out again with a teakettle, which he filled at the cistern, and carrying it back set it on a small oil stove, which he lighted.
"We'll have some tea," he said, sitting down beside her and asking again how she was.
Rosalind summoned all her learning and spelled out carefully, with the aid of some very dainty fingers, "I-am-lon—"
"Lonesome?" repeated the magician. "That is too bad. Mr. Pat wouldn't like that."
Rosalind shook her head. The tears were near the surface, but she kept them back, and remembering her book she laid it on the magician's knee, open at the words Cousin Louis had written: "If we choose we may travel always in the Forest where the birds sing and the sunlight sifts through the trees; where although we sometimes grow footsore and hungry we know that the goal is sure. Just outside is the dreary desert in which, alas! many choose to walk, shutting their eyes to the beauty and peace of the Forest, and losing by the way the sacred gift of happiness."
The magician read it slowly through, then he smiled at Rosalind over his glasses. "That's so," he said. "It is hard to keep out of the desert sometimes, but it all comes right in the end. Why, the other day I was—" here he shook his head and put on a woe-begone expression of countenance that made his meaning plain, and caused Rosalind to laugh—"and I looked up and there you stood in the door and pointed to the motto, 'Good in everything,' and I felt better."
"Did I really cheer you up?" cried Rosalind, delighted; and nodding quite as if he heard, the magician answered, "Now I'll cheer you up." Rising, he beckoned her to follow him inside, and she obeyed, feeling as if she were somebody in a story.
The kettle was already singing merrily, and from a shelf the magician took down a fat little teapot and, rinsing it with boiling water, proceeded to make tea. Next he spread a white cloth on a small table, and from the cupboard took out some blue and white cups and plates.
"Let me set it," begged Rosalind, in pantomime, entering gayly into the spirit of the thing.
Laughing, the magician left it to her and went off to his store-room, from which he emerged with a pitcher of milk and a loaf of brown bread.