Page:The Children Who Followed the Piper.djvu/71

 John Ball when they heard this said. Would they never, then, come to the fullness of their height and their strength? The sense of a great, greatloss came over them. All they had done and all they had ever known, they thought, was as nothing to what was being taken from them.

And then the voices ceased to come from the trees, and the two boys stood there feeling lonely and lost. They saw the same star dangling in the sky that had been there when they had first come into the wood. Never, never, as men grown tall and strong would they look on that star. And when that thought came into their minds they looked all around them.

Where could they go? Beyond the ash trees and the white-thorn trees there was the Deep Wood, and beyond the Deep Wood there was the Dark Forest. Could they go through the Dark Forest and out into the world, they wondered.

They went toward where the Deep Wood began. Their way went past where Old Janus sat. He was in a doorway to which there was