At these words Freda lay down on the floor and bellowed at the top of her voice.
“If you don’t drink it,” said the nurse, “you will have a terrible pain.”
“Whoo-hoo-hoo,” said Freda (for this was the way that she bellowed), and she crawled right under the table—in her best frock—and stayed there.
“Now, Miss Freda,” said the nurse presently, when everything else had failed, “I shall put this glass on the table here, and I shall go upstairs and turn on your bath, and if you haven’t drunk it by the time I come back again, I shall be very angry indeed.”
Then she left the room, and after a second Freda came out from under the table and picked up the glass and sloshed all the slimy stuff in it into the fireplace, and it spluttered and fizzed and disappeared from sight.
And when she had done this, she was terribly frightened.
She was so frightened that when the nurse came back and said, “Ah, that’s a good little girl. I see you’ve drunk it all up nicely,” she never said anything at all. She didn’t even bellow at the top of her voice.
All the time she was having her bath she was trying to say what she had done, but she never could quite bring herself to do it. And after she was in bed she called out suddenly to her nurse, meaning to say what she had done with the slimy stuff in the little glass; but when the nurse came in, she just couldn’t get it out. She pretended that she had wanted a drink of water, and the nurse gave it her and went away again, and Freda was left alone—still feeling terribly frightened.
“Supposing,” she thought, “that star really was made of poison. Supposing that stuff I threw in the fire might have saved me. Oh dear, if the poison kills me now, it will be all my own fault.”
It was a long time before she could go to sleep, and in the morning she hadn’t been awake for more than five minutes when it all came back to her. But she had left it so long now, that it was quite impossible to tell anyone.