'How you muddle your "her's" and "she's"!' I said. But of course I understood him. 'I think you muddle yourself too. If there's a mystery, and you know you'd be very disappointed if there wasn't, you couldn't expect the little girl to come to tea just as if everything was quite like everybody else about her.'
'No, that's true,' said he, consideringly. 'P'raps she's invisible sometimes, or p'raps she's like the "Light Princess," that they had to tie down for fear she'd float away, or p'raps——'
'She's invisible to us, anyway,' I interrupted, for, as I said, I was getting rather tired of Pete's fancies about the little girl, 'and so——'
But just as I got so far, we both stopped—we were passing the railing of the little girl's house at that moment, and voices talking rather loudly caught our ears. Peterkin touched my arm, and we stood quite still. No one could see us, it was too dark, and there was no lamp just there, though some light was streaming out from the lower windows of the house. One of them, the dining-room one, was a little open, even though it was a chilly evening.
It was so queer, our hearing the voices and almost seeing into the room, just as we had been making up our minds that we'd never know anything about the little girl; it seemed so queer, that we didn't, at first, think of anything else. It wasn't for some minutes, or moments, certainly, that it came into my head that we shouldn't stay there peeping and listening. I'm afraid it wasn't a very gentlemanly sort of thing to do. As for Peterkin, I'm pretty sure he never had the slightest idea that we were doing anything caddish.
What we heard was this—
'No, I don't want any more tea. I'd better go to bed. It's so dull, Nana.'
Then another voice replied—it came from some one further back in the room, but we could not distinguish the words—
'There aren't any stars. You may as well shut the window. And stars aren't much good. I want some one to play with me. Other little—' but just then we saw the shadow of some one crossing the room, and the window—it was a glass-door kind of window like the ones up above, which opened on to the balcony, for there was a little sort of balcony downstairs too—was quickly closed. There was no more to be heard or seen; not even shadows, for the curtains were now drawn across.
Pete gave a deep sigh, and I felt that he was looking at me, though it was too dark to see, and there was no lamp just there. He wanted to know what I thought.