“He can’t see when the star is gone,” said the other. “He can’t see us, then,” they said, the both of them. “You might come out,” said Johnny.
“We can’t come out,” they said. “We’d die if we came out.” “I can’t ever see you, then.”
“You can’t ever see us, Johnny.”
And he stood there, feeling terribly lonely because he could never see these friends of his.
“We don’t understand who you are,” they said. “Tell us who you are.
And because they were so kind and friendly, he told them who he was and how he was an orphan and had been taken in by his Uncle Eb and Aunt Em, who really weren’t his aunt and uncle. He didn’t tell them how Uncle Eb and Aunt Em treated him, whipping him and scolding him and sending him to bed without his supper, but this, too, as well as the things he told them, was there for them to sense and now there was more than friendliness, more than fellowship. Now there was compassion and something that was their equivalent of mother love.
“He’s just a little one,” they said, talking to one another.
They reached out to him and seemed to take him in their arms and hold him tight against them and Johnny went down on his knees without knowing it and held out his arms to the things that lay there among the broken bushes and cried out to them, as if there was something there that he might grasp and hold-some comfort that he had always missed and longed for and now finally had found. His heart cried out the thing that lie could not say, the pleading that would not pass his lips, and they answered him.
“No, we’ll not leave you, Johnny. We can’t leave you, Johnny.”
“You promise?” Johnny asked.