He pressed her no further. He doubtless believed she had spoken the truth. She had ever been candid. Now, however, she lacked courage to speak. She remembered that the boy had said ‘I come to you with a message.’ He had disappeared without giving it. What was that message? Was he gone without delivering it?
Mr. Jordan slowly ate his breakfast. Every now and then he looked at his daughter, never steadily, for he could look fixedly long at nothing.
‘I will tell you all, papa,’ said Eve suddenly, shaking her head, to shake off the temptation to be untrue. Her better nature had prevailed. ‘It was not a dream, it was a reality. I did see a pixy on the Raven Rock, the maddest, merriest, ugliest imp in the world.’
‘We are surrounded by an unseen creation,’ said Mr. Jordan. ‘The microscope reveals to us teeming life in a drop of water. Another generation will use an instrument that will show them the air full of living things. Then the laugh will be no more heard on earth. Life will be grave, if not horrible. This generation is sadder than the last because less ignorant.’
‘O papa! He was not a pixy at all. I have seen him before, when Mr. Jasper was thrown. Then he was perched like an ape, as he is, on the cross you set up, where my mother first appeared to you. He was making screams with his fiddle.’
Mr. Jordan looked at her with flickering, frightened eyes. ‘It was a spirit—the horse saw it and started—that was how Jasper was thrown,’ he said gravely.
‘Here Jasper comes,’ said Eve, laughing; ‘ask him.’ But instead of waiting for her father to do this, she sprang up, and danced to meet him with the simplicity of a child, and clapping her palms, she asked, ‘Mr. Jasper! My father will have it that my funny little pixy was a spirit of the woods or wold, and will not believe that he is flesh and blood.’
‘My daughter,’ said Mr. Jordan, ‘has told me a strange story. She says that she saw a boy on the—the Raven Rock, and that you know him.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Whence comes he?’