Gretel swallowed her medicine without a word of protest, and then, having locked her door against intruders, she once more drew her treasure from its hiding-place.
“It is mine; it is; it is!” she told herself almost fiercely. “I found it. I don’t have to take it back. Perhaps the person who dropped it doesn’t care any more about ‘Lohengrin’ than Mrs. Marsh and Ada do. Anyway, nobody knows where it is now; nobody but me, and I want it—oh, I want it more than I ever wanted anything in my life before.”
And then Gretel undressed very quickly, and crept into bed, with the ticket to fairy-land safely deposited under her pillow.
CHAPTER IV
THE COMING OF THE PRINCE
IT was half-past one on Saturday afternoon. Mrs. Marsh and her daughter had gone out of town to attend the wedding of a friend, and Gretel knew they could not return much before six o’clock. She had finished her solitary luncheon, for which she had little more appetite than for her dinner the previous evening, and was standing before the bureau in her little room, putting on her hat and jacket. Her heart was thumping in great excited bounds, and her eyes shone in a way which would have convinced Mrs. Marsh more firmly than ever, had she seen them, that the child was feverish.
Ever since she awoke that morning Gretel had been fighting with her conscience. That ever persistent “small voice” had been making itself heard very clearly, but with an almost desperate determination, the little girl had resolutely closed her “inward ear.”
“I must go; I must; I must,” she kept repeating over and over to herself. “If it wasn’t ‘Lohengrin,’ I would take it back, but Father loved ‘Lohengrin’ best of all. Oh, it can’t be so very wrong; I am sure it can’t.”
And now the magic hour had actually come. All the morning she had watched the clock, and it had seemed to her that time had never dragged so before. She was sure it ought to have been at least twelve, when the hands of that tiresome clock would persist in pointing to only half-past ten. But at last it was really time to start.
“I’ll go very early,” she had decided. “It will be so beautiful to just sit there and hear the instruments being tuned.”
There was no necessity of making any explanation to the colored maid. She was a stupid, careless person, to whom Gretel and her affairs were of very little consequence, and would scarcely have noticed whether the child were in the house or out of it.