“No. Oh, no!”
“Well? Why, then?”
“Don't be cruel to me, Chris,” pleaded the voice, a very wee, piteous voice now. Brown-and-gold fairies should not be bullied by little, red, fierce men with the toothache. They are not accustomed to it and they don't know how to defend themselves. Up to this moment my one purpose had been to tiptoe unobtrusively to the door and escape. Now I wondered whether I ought not to stay and offer aid to the abused fairy. At the next word from the Little Red Doctor, however, I gave up that notion, and resumed my cautious retreat.
“I? Cruel—to you?” he said desolately. Then, after a long pause: “I can't see you. I'm glad I can't see you. If you could know how many times I've seen you since—since I went away.”
“Seen me? Where?”
“Nowhere. Everywhere. Night after weary night. For a year. Or perhaps it was two years. Only, then you weren't real. You didn't sing.”
“Ah!” The exclamation hardly stirred the air. But I knew, as well as if I had seen it, that the woman's eyes of the brown-and-gold fairy were yearning to him and that her hands were pressed over her woman's heart, which yearned to him, too.
“No. You never sang to me. You spoke. You said the same thing over and over again. You said, 'I don't love you and I never did love you and I never could love you.'”
There was a stifled cry from the darkness, and a rustle and the sound of swift, light feet. Two dim figures met and merged in one. The fairy voice, with a desperate effort to be still a voice and not quite a sob of mingled pity and joy, murmured brokenly: “I—I d-d-don't love you. But I c-c-can't live away from you.” And I passed out, on tiptoe, unnoted. The tiptoe feature was, I dare say, superfluous. I suppose I might have marched out to the blare of a brass band and with a salvo of artillery, and still have been as a formless, soundless wraith to the Little Red Doctor who stood holding all heaven and earth in his arms.
Quarter of an hour afterward I sat on the front steps of the house of Dead-Men's-Shoes musing. The Little Red Doctor and the brown-and-gold fairy came out together. They were conversing in demure tones and with a commonplace air about the prospects of rain. So wholly at ease and natural did they seem that I began to have misgivings. It didn't seem in human nature that they should be calmly discussing the weather. Could I have fallen asleep on my heap of mortuary clothing and dreamed all that happiness of theirs? I rose and intercepted them.