'I don't know what you mean about doing anything,' I said. 'And please don't say "we." I haven't promised to join you. Most likely I'll do my best to stop whatever it is you've got in that rummy head of yours.'
'Oh no, you won't!' he replied coolly. 'I don't know that you could if you tried, without telling the others. And you can't do that, of course, as I've trusted you. It's word of honour, you see, though I didn't exactly make you say so. And it's nothing naughty or mischievous, else I wouldn't plan it.'
'What is it, then? Hurry up and tell me, without such a lot of preparation,' I grumbled.
'I can't tell you very much,' he answered, ''cos, you see, I don't know myself. It will show as we go on—I'm certain you'll help me, Gilley. You remember the prince in the "Sleeping Beauty" did not know exactly what he would do—no more did the one in——'
'Never mind all that,' I interrupted.
'Well, then, what we've got to do is to try to talk to her ourselves without any one hearing. That's the first thing. We will tell her what the parrot says, and then it will be easy to find out if she knows herself about the spell.'
'But what do you think the spell is?' I asked, feeling again the strange interest and half belief in his fancies that Peterkin managed to put into me. 'What do you suppose your bad fairies, or whatever they are, have done to her?'
'There are lots of things, it might be,' he replied gravely. 'They may have made her not able to walk, or very queer to look at—p'raps turned her hair white, so that you couldn't be sure if she was a little girl or an old woman; or made her nose so long that it trails on the floor. No, I don't think it's that,' he added, after stopping to think a minute. 'Her voice sounds as if she was pretty, even if it's rather grumbly. P'raps she turns into a mouse at night, and has to run about, and that's why she's so tired. It might be that.'
'It would be easy to catch her, then, and bring her home in your pocket, if you waited till the magic time came,' I suggested, half joking again, of course.
'It might be,' agreed Pete, quite seriously, 'or it might be very, very difficult, unless we could make her understand at the mouse time that we were friends. We can't settle anything till we see her, and talk to her like a little girl, of course.'