Mortal
eyesight is too slow and clumsy a thing to match against the
flicker of a pixy-litten fire."
Hand in hand we wandered through that enchanted place, seeking the
folk of elf-land, "and heard their mystic voices calling, from
fairy knoll and haunted hill." Not till the fire died down into
ashes did we leave the grove. Then we found that the full moon
was gleaming lustrously from a cloudless sky across the valley.
Between us and her stretched up a tall pine, wondrously straight
and slender and branchless to its very top, where it overflowed in
a crest of dark boughs against the silvery splendour behind it.
Beyond, the hill farms were lying in a suave, white radiance.
"Doesn't it seem a long, long time to you since we left home this
afternoon?" asked the Story Girl. "And yet it is only a few hours."
Only a few hours--true; yet such hours were worth a cycle of
common years untouched by the glory and the dream.
CHAPTER XXIX
WE LOSE A FRIEND
Our beautiful October was marred by one day of black tragedy--the
day Paddy died. For Paddy, after seven years of as happy a life
as ever a cat lived, died suddenly--of poison, as was supposed.
Where he had wandered in the darkness to meet his doom we did not
know, but in the frosty dawnlight he dragged himself home to die.
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