Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/103

104 thing is the ordinary people, standing and sitting about—they really are lifelike; some of the others are rather too like life to be quite lifelike and rather too dead for you to want to be alone with them in the dark. But the other ones—I don't really like them, even in broad daylight. Look at that one on the seat there—just a hard-up, tired boy—shabby clothes, worn shoes—all complete—just like life, and yet it's much more like. . . Oh, I don't know!"

"That's not wax," said Lucilla, "that's real."

"It does almost look like it," Jane confessed, "but you can tell by the hands. That sort of waxy pale yellow—that's what gives it away. Come close and look if you don't believe me." They went close to the figure on the red velvet bench, which certainly represented with extraordinary fidelity a tired youth asleep, head dropped on the breast, arms folded, waxen white hands on the sleeves of a very shabby coat.

"There's one mistake though," Jane pointed out. "If he was real and as shabby as that, his hands and nails wouldn't be so beautifully clean."

She sat down on the bench by the figure with Lucilla on her other side.

"I believe it is real," Lucilla persisted, "and I don't like it. I mean I don't like its being so like real if it's only wax. It is real, Jane—come away!"

"It isn't," said Jane, "look here!" and she caught in her hand the arm of the wax figure.

Of course you are prepared to hear that the figure sprang to its feet, and that it was not wax, but neither you nor anyone else could have been prepared for the shriek with which the wax figure leapt up, nor the answering shriek which Jane contributed when the wax figure came to life, so to speak, in her hands.

The man who had been wax, and the girl who had been so sure that he was nothing else, stood staring at each other.

"What was it? Did I call out?" he asked.

"Ye—ye—yes," said Lucilla.