"Home so early! It's half-past five, if you please. Why, you lazy little thing, you've been asleep all the time!"
Bab looked at the clock on the mantel-piece, and saw it was a quarter to six. How quickly the time passes when you are with fairies! She knew she had not been asleep, because she knew she had had the visit from the fairy, and she was so anxious to know what would happen next. About seven o'clock she thought she might go out with a long pole to the tree; and she supposed the fairies had put the book somewhere, till the birds should come and drive Blackamè out of it, and she hoped very much Mr. Beresford would not miss his beautiful book till then, when it would be clear from the black splotch which she now knew was not Blackamè.
"Where is Robert?" asked Miss Selina. "He dashed out of the carriage and through here, and he must have gone out by the window. And you must have been asleep, or you would have heard him."
Bab remembered the sound of the rush through the window, and she saw now a spill of ink just by the place where the book had been. But Robert could not have been there, because she was talking to the fairy at the very time, and she must have noticed him, and felt him greatly in the way.
When it was past seven o'clock, Bab slipped away, and took Mr. Beresford's alpenstock out of the stand in the hall, and beat about the branches of the elms and horse-chestnuts, and danced and sang, holding her dress up, and did everything exactly as the fairy had told her to do, and as you will see her doing in the picture.
But she had not been dancing and singing (Bab often recalled the scene, when she was older, with pleasure) more than about twenty minutes before Aunt Anastasia put her head out of the window, and told her to come in.
It was much pleasanter to be dancing for the fairies up and down, with outstretched frock, than to go into the house and find Blackamè still on the page, and have to confess she brought him there, and be in disgrace for it.
Mr. Beresford held out a kind hand to her, and drew her to his side.
The book, when Mr. Beresford took it in his hands, naturally opened at the page where it had been lying open that morning so long, and there were all the fairies and butterflies lying flat and beautiful, and the verses in the middle of the page. But there, instead of Blackamè, were five or six Blackamès perhaps, intertwining together like the fairies and the butterflies, but bearing to mortal eyes nothing but the appearance of a thick smudge of ink.