Page:Pan's Garden.djvu/468

 'Better than yesterday, eh?' he suggested once, to see what she would answer, yet sure it would be right.

She darted to his side. 'That was all stuffed,' she said, laconically as himself, and making a wry face. And then she added with a grave expression, half anxious and half solemn, 'Fancy, if that got in! Oh, Uncle!'

'Couldn't,' he comforted himself and her, delighted secretly.

But it was on their way home to tea in the dusk, feeling as if they had known one another all their lives, so quickly had friendship been cemented, that she said her first genuinely strange thing. For a long time she had been silent by his side, apparently tired, when suddenly out popped this little criticism that showed her mind was actively working all the time.

'Uncle, you have been busy—keeping it so safe. I suppose you did most of it at night.'

He started. His own thoughts had been travelling in several directions at once.

'I don't walk in my sleep,' he laughed.

'I mean when the stars are shining,' she said. She felt it as delicately as that, then! She felt the dream quality in it. 'I mean, it loves you best when the sun has set and it comes out of its hole,' she added, as he said nothing.

'Mánya, it loves you too—already,' he said gently.

Then came the astonishing thing. The voice was curious; the words seemed to come from a long way off, taking time to reach him. They took time to reach her too, as though another had first whispered them. It almost seemed as though she listened while she said them. A sense of the uncanny touched him here in the shadowy dark wood: