'Not exactly,' said Silva; 'but she made me like doing things well. She made me see how pretty it is to do things rightly—quite rightly, just as they should be.'
'And do you always do things that way?' exclaimed Maia, very much impressed. 'I don't; I'm very often dreadfully untidy, and sometimes my exercise-books are full of blots and mistakes. I wish I had had your godmother to teach me, Silva.'
'Well, you're going to have her now. She teaches without one knowing it. But I'm not perfect, nor is Waldo! Indeed we're not—and if we thought we were it would show we weren't.'
'Besides,' said Waldo, 'all the things we have to do are very simple and easy. We don't know anything about the world, and all we should have to do and learn if we lived there.'
'Should you like to live there?' asked Maia. Both Waldo and Silva hesitated. Then both, with the grave expression in their eyes that came there sometimes, replied, 'I don't know;' but Waldo in a moment or two added, 'If it had to be, it would be right to like it.'
'Yes,' said Silva quietly. But something in their tone made both Rollo and Maia feel puzzled.
'I do believe you're both half fairies,' exclaimed Maia with a little impatience; 'I can't make you out at all.'
Rollo felt the same, though, being more considerate than his little sister, he did not like to express his feelings so freely. But Waldo and Silva only laughed merrily.
'No, no, indeed we're not,' they said more than once, but Maia did not seem convinced by any means, and she was going on to maintain that no children who weren't half fairies could live like that by themselves and manage everything so beautifully, when a slight noise at the door and a sudden look of pleasure on Silva's face made her stop short and look round.
'Here she is,' exclaimed Waldo and Silva together. 'Oh, godmother, darling, we are so glad. And they have come, Rollo and Maia have come, just as you said.'