“I’m going to see,” said Merrimeg. “I may have hurt somebody. I can see better from the end of that log.”
There was a dead log, the trunk of a fallen tree, lying out from the bank of the pool into the water, and Merrimeg stepped onto it and getting down on her hands and knees crawled out to the end of it. It was slippery, and she had to hold on very carefully to keep from falling off into the water.
She leaned over as far as she could and looked down into the pool. She looked everywhere for the star, but she couldn’t see it; there seemed to be some dark thing under the water between herself and the star.
“The star is gone!” she said to the others, in a whisper.
As she said this, a hand came up out of the water and seized her wrist and pulled her off the log. Over she went into the pool, down, down, far down. The hand never once let go of her wrist. It pulled her down and down, faster and faster. At first she thought she was going to choke with the water, but in a moment she was all right again, only wet, very wet. And in another moment she was at the bottom, and the hand let go of her wrist. She stood up on her two feet on a floor of what looked like glass.
There was a pale light shining all about her through the water, and she saw that it came from the star, lying on the floor nearby. Just over her head was a roof of glass, and it was badly broken in three or four places. Around her were walls of glass. She was in a little house of glass, with a broken roof, and full of water.
A hand took hold suddenly of her arm, and she was dragged across the floor in a great hurry, by the creature who had pulled her down from the log. It was a sprite; a water sprite, whose head just reached to her shoulder; full-grown, evidently, in spite of being so small; with pointed ears, and no hair on his head, and long green water grass trailing around him.
He dragged Merrimeg straight to the star, and picked it up by a kind of sling that it was meant to hang by. It flashed and glittered as he snatched it up.
He pointed to the floor, and Merrimeg saw, lying there side by side, three tiny sprites, babies, no bigger than kittens, and exactly like the grown one who was holding her arm. They looked as if they were asleep, but on the forehead of each one was a black and blue bruise, and Merrimeg knew that she must have hurt them with her stones, as well as broken the glass of their little home.
Their father, if it was their father, motioned to her to pick them up. She gathered them up in her arms, and the sprite, carrying the star in one hand, seized her hair with the other hand and sprang up towards the holes in the broken glass roof; and in another instant she was being dragged upward through the water as fast as she had been pulled down.