Page:Oswald Bastable and Others - Nesbit.djvu/244

212 'Excuse me,' the footman said firmly; 'one thing I'm not bound to do is to give advice.' 'But you'll do anything else I tell you?'

'Yes, miss—almost anything. I'll talk to you willing, I will, and tell you my life's sorrows.'

'I should like that some other time,' said Fina, 'but just now, perhaps, you'd better get me a doll.' And a doll lay at her feet among the dead leaves. It was a farthing Dutch doll.

'You didn't say what sort of a doll,' said the footman, when she had rubbed the ring and he had reappeared, and she had reproached him. 'I've been in service long enough to do exactly what I am told. My life-sorrow has been' 'I say,' Fina said suddenly, 'can't you get the pagoda back for me?'

Instantly the pagoda was there and the footman was not. Fina spent the afternoon playing with the beautiful ivory toy, but when it was teatime she had to ask the genie footman to take it away again, for she dared not face the questions and she could not invent the explanations that would have followed if she had turned up at the house with the pagoda under her arm.

You will think that Fina ought to have been