The mother, meanwhile, had gone in search of the shawl and stockings. Without heeding the remonstrance of his two children, who still kept murmuring that their little snow-sister did not love the warmth, good Mr. Lindsey took his departure, shutting the parlour door carefully behind him.
Turning up the collar of his sack over his ears, he emerged from the house, and had barely reached the street-gate, when he was recalled by the screams of Violet and Peony and the rapping of a thimbled finger against the parlour window.
“Husband! husband!” cried his wife, showing her horror-stricken face through the window panes. “There is no need of going for the child’s parents!”
“We told you so, father!” screamed Violet and Peony, as he re-entered the parlour. “You would bring her in; and now our poor—dear—beau-ti-ful little snow-sister is thawed!”
And their own sweet little faces were already dissolved in tears; so that their father, seeing what strange things occasionally happen in this every-day world, felt not a little anxious lest his children might be going to thaw too. In the utmost perplexity, he demanded an explanation of his wife. She could only reply that, being summoned to the parlour by cries of Violet and Peony, she found no trace of the little white maiden, unless it were the remains of a heap of snow, which, while she was gazing at it, melted quite away upon the hearth-rug.
“And there you see all that is left of it!” added she, pointing to a pool of water, in front of the stove.
“Yes, father,” said Violet, looking reproachfully at him through her tears, “there is all that is left of our dear little snow-sister!”
“Naughty father!” cried Peony, stamping his foot, and—I shudder to say—shaking his little fist at the common-sensible man. “We told you how it would be! What for did you bring her in?”
And the stove, through the isinglass of its door, seemed to glare at good Mr. Lindsey, like a red-eyed demon, triumphing in the mischief which it had done! (Abridged.)