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But Priscilla came to him and held out her hand quite gratefully and humbly. ‘Thank you, Dick,’ she said; ‘you are kind, at all events. And I am sorry you couldn’t have your horse-shoe pin!’

‘Oh, hang the horse-shoe pin!’ exclaimed Dick, and poor Priscilla was so thoroughly cast down that she quite forgot to reprove him.

She was not sent home that night after all, for Dick protested against it in such strong terms that even Aunt Margarine saw that she must give way; but early on the following morning Priscilla quitted her aunt’s house, leaving her belongings to be sent on after her.

She had not far to walk, and it so happened that her way led through the identical lane in which she had met the fairy. Wonderful to relate, there, on the very same stone and in precisely the same attitude, sat the old lady, peering out from under her poke-bonnet, and resting her knotty old hands on her crutch-handled stick!

Priscilla walked past with her head in the air, pretending not to notice her, for she considered that the fairy had played her a most malicious and ill-natured trick.

‘Heyday!’ said the old lady (it is only fairies who can permit themselves such old-fashioned expressions nowadays). ‘Heyday, why, here’s my good little girl again! Isn’t she going to speak to me?’

‘No, she’s not,’ said Priscilla–but she found herself compelled to stop, notwithstanding.

‘Why, what’s all this about? You’re not going to sulk with me, my dear, are you?’

‘I think you’re a very cruel, bad, unkind old woman for deceiving me like this!’

‘Goodness me! Why, didn’t the jewels come, after all?’

‘Yes–they came, only they were all horrid artificial ones–and it is a shame, it is!’ cried poor Priscilla from her bursting heart.

‘Artificial, were they? that really is very odd! Can you account for that at all, now?’

‘Of course I can’t! You told me that they would drop out whenever I said anything to improve people–and I was always saying something improving! Aunt had a bandbox in her room quite full of them.’

‘Ah, you’ve been very industrious, evidently; it’s unfortunate your jewels should all have been artificial–most unfortunate. I don’t know how to explain it, unless’–(and here the old lady looked up queerly from under her white eyelashes), ‘unless your goodness was artificial too?’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Priscilla, feeling strangely uncomfortable. ‘I’m sure I’ve never done anything the least bit naughty–how can my goodness possibly be artificial?’

‘Ah, that I can’t explain; but I know this–that people who are really good are generally the last persons to suspect it, and the moment they become aware of it and begin to think how good they are, and how bad everybody else is, why, somehow or other, their goodness crumbles away and leaves only a sort of outside shell behind it. And–I’m very old, and of course I may be mistaken–but I think (I only say I think, mind) that a little girl so young as you must have some faults hidden about her somewhere, and that perhaps on the whole she would be better employed in trying to find them out and cure them before she attempted to correct those of other people. And I’m sure it can’t be good for any child to be always seeing herself in a little picture, just as she likes to fancy other people see her. Very many pretty books are written about good little girls, and it is quite true that children may exercise a great influence for good–more than they can ever tell, perhaps–but only just so long as they remain natural and unconscious, and not unwholesome little pragmatical prigesses; for then they make themselves and other people worse than they might have been. But of course, my dear, you never made such a mistake as that!’

Priscilla turned very red, and began to scrape one of her feet against the other; she was thinking, and her thoughts were not at all pleasant ones.