"Maw," I gulped. "Who—who you talking to?"
"Why, with Mrs.—Mrs. Jones here, of course." She laughed although her eyes refused to meet mine. "Mrs. Jones, this is my grandson I was telling you about. Take off your cap, son, and say—"
"But Maw," I gulped. "There's no one there. It's just your reflection in the looking glass."
"Why—why so it is," she stammered, brushing one brown hand across her eyes. "I was just fooling." She jumped to her feet and started bustling about like her old indefatigable self. "Now run along and fill the wood box. Then wash your hands and help me peel these 'taters. I'm way late with supper, what with having to stop to talk—I mean I must have set down to rest and went to sleep."
Then began one of the strangest battles in the history of fairie—two children against a mirror, for of course I enlisted poor Annette on my side. I tried to explain to Aunt Ellen but she merely smiled understandingly and patted me with one fat hand while her prominent eyes fluttered back to the glass.
I wrote a scrawl to Uncle Bill, my favorite, and he left his hardware store the next weekend and came down from the city with a little chinwhiskered doctor. Since psychiatry was almost unknown in those days the physician looked at Maw's tongue, thumped her chest, asked her a few questions, which she answered with sly humor, and pronounced her sound.
"I think it's you that's imagining things, boy," said Uncle Bill when he took me for a walk in the woods after one of Maw's wonderful chicken dinners. "We're all upset by Paw's going. Just don't worry about things."
"But Uncle Bill," I protested. "I heard what I saw."
"I know—I know." His lean shrewd face had a worried look, I noticed with an upward glance. "You're a highstrung youngster. Write me often, though. And I'll come down every time I can. Say—look!" I could almost hear him sigh with relief at an opportunity to change the subject. "There's a patch of violets already. Let's pick some and take them back to Maw and Ellen. It'll make them happy."
After that, of course, I had to carry on the fight with only Annette to help.