“Don't you? Then how did he look?”
“Severe.”
“I know! Oh, how well I know!” Her voice declined to a caressing murmur. “And all the time there's that twinkle of fun and sympathy underneath the frown. Oh, ever so deep underneath! It took me a long time to find it.”
“And longer to forget it?” I suggested with malice.
“I don't want to forget it,” retorted the fairy loftily. “I could if I chose. You're sure there isn't anything the matter with him?”
“I never said there wasn't anything the matter with him. I said he wasn't ill.”
“Oh, well, I think it's very mean of you. You may go and sit on that pile of coats—the unpressed ones—and watch me work my poor fingers to the bone sewing on buttons until your hard heart softens and you come to a properer frame of mind.”
Accordingly I sat down and contemplated, not without a certain grim satisfaction, the spectacle of a brown-and-gold fairy sentenced to honest labor. Shadows deepened in the room until she was almost in darkness. If the necessity of labor weighed upon her blithe spirit, she gave no evidence of it, for presently she began to hum to herself in a soft, crooning undertone, “speech half-asleep or song half-awake.” Clearer and clearer grew the melody, waxing to full awakeness, as the fresh and lovely young voice filled the room with the verse, one single line of which had dragged the Little Red Doctor's heart back across the unforgetting years:—
“The falling dew is cold and chill,
And no bird sings in Arcady;
The little fauns have left the hill;
Even the tired daffodil
Has closed its gilded doors, and still
My lover comes not back to me.”
The girlish voice trembled and stopped. The singer's hands fell into her lap. Her eyes dreamed. I think she must have forgotten, in the spell of music that she wove, the presence of an old man in the darkening room. I heard a soft, weary little catch of the breath, and then a name pronounced low and beseechingly, “Chris.” Now, this drama, as laid out by that romantic manageress the Bonnie Lassie, did not include music. The fairy song, I strongly suspect, was the interposition of the Higher Gods of Destiny. For the spell of it evolved and made real the past, and out of the past stepped the Little Red Doctor and stood trembling in the doorway of the ol'-clo' repository.