Chapter 13

'Not a long story, is it, Mab?' inquired Dolly rather dubiously. But she finally settled herself comfortably down to listen, with her bright little face laid against Mabel's side, while she read the melancholy fate of the sugar fairy prince.

Dolly heard it all out in silence, and with a growing trouble in her eyes. When it was all over, and the heartless mortal princess had swallowed the sugar prince, she turned half away and said softly, 'Mabel, that was _me_.'

Mabel laughed. 'What _do_ you mean, Dolly?' she said.

'I thought he was plain sugar,' Dolly protested piteously; 'how was I to know? I never heard of sugar fairies before. And he did look pretty at first, but I spilt some tea over him, and the colour got all mixed up, just as the story says it did, and so I ate him.'

'It's only a story, Dolly, you know; you needn't make yourself unhappy about it--it isn't true really.'

'But it must be true, it's all put down exactly as it happened.... And it was me.... I've eaten up a real fairy prince.... Mabel, I'm a greedy pig. If I hadn't done it, perhaps we could have got him out of the sugar somehow, and then Colin and I would have had a live fairy to play with. That's what he expected me to do, and I ate him instead. I know he was a fairy, Mabel, he tasted so nice.... Poor, poor little prince!'

Dolly was so evidently distressed that Mabel tried hard to convince her that the story was about another little girl, the prince was only a sugar one, and so on; but she did not succeed, until the idea struck her that a writer whose book seemed to indicate a sympathetic nature would not object to the trouble of removing the childish fears he had aroused, and she said: 'Listen, Dolly; suppose you write a letter to Mr. Ernstone--at his publishers', you know--I'll show you how to address it, but you must write the rest yourself, and ask him to tell you if the sugar prince was really a fairy, and then you will know all about it; but my own belief is, Dolly, that there aren't any fairies--now, at any rate.'

'If there weren't,' argued Dolly, 'people wouldn't write books about them. I've seen pictures of them lots of times.'

'And they dance in rows at the pantomime, don't they, Dolly?' said Mabel.

'Oh, I know _those_ aren't fairies--only thin little girls,' said Dolly contemptuously. 'I'm not a baby, Mabel, but I _would_ write to Mr.--what you said just now--only I hate letter-writing so--ink is such blotty, messy stuff--and I daresay he wouldn't answer after all.'

'Try him, dear,' said Mabel.

Dolly looked obstinate and said nothing just then, and Mabel did not think it well to refer to the matter again. But the next week, from certain little affectations of tremendous mystery on Dolly's part, and the absence of the library copy of 'Illusion' from the morning-room during one whole afternoon, after which it reappeared in a state of preternatural inkiness, Mabel had a suspicion that her suggestion was not so disregarded as it had seemed.

And a few days afterwards Mark found on his breakfast table an envelope from his publisher, which proved to contain a letter directed to 'Mr. Ciril Ernstone,' at the office. The letter was written in a round childish hand, with scrapings here and there to record the fall of a vanquished blot.

'Dear Mr. Ciril Ernstone,' it ran, 'I want you to tell me how you knew that I ate that sugar prince in your story, and if you meant me really. Perhaps you made that part of it up, or else it was some other girl, but please write and tell me who it was and all about it, because I do so hate to think I've eaten up a real fairy without knowing it.--DOROTHY MARGARET LANGTON.'

This poor little letter made Mark very angry; if he had written the story he would, of course, have been amused if not pleased by the naive testimony to his power; but, as it was, it annoyed him to a quite unreasonable extent.

He threw Dolly's note pettishly across the table; 'I wish I had cut that sugar prince story out; _I_ can't tell the child anything about it. Langton, too--wonder if it's any relation to my Langton--sister of his, perhaps--_he_ lives at Notting Hill somewhere. Well, I won't write; if I do I shall put my foot in it somehow.... It's quite likely that Vincent knew this child. She can't be seriously unhappy about such a piece of nonsense, and if she is, it's not _my_ fault.'

Mark had never quite lost the memory of that morning in the fog, his brief meeting with Mabel, and the untimely parting by the hedge. Subsequent events had naturally done something to efface the impression which her charm and grace had made upon him then; but even yet he saw her face at times as clearly as ever, and suffered once more the dull pain he had felt when he first knew that she had gone from him without leaving him the faintest hope of being ever privileged to know her more intimately or even see her again.

Sometimes, when he dreamed most wildly of the brilliant future that was to come to him, he saw himself, as the author of several famous and successful works (amongst which 'Illusion' was entirely obscured), meeting her once more, and marking his sense of her past ingratitude by a studied coldness. But this was a possibility that never, even in his most sanguine moments, was other than remote.

If he had but known it, there had long been close at hand--in the shape of young Langton--a means which, judiciously managed, might have brought that part of his dream to pass immediately, and now he had that which would realise it even more surely and effectually.

But he did not know, and let the appeal lie unanswered that was due to Mabel's suggestion--'the moral of which,' as Alice's Duchess might say, is that one should never neglect a child's letter.