She was so kind that I felt I had been rather horrid, for I _had_ enjoyed it all very much. And I said as nicely as I could, that I'd like to come again, only I hoped we didn't bother her. She beamed all over at that, and Peterkin evidently approved of it too, for he grinned in a queer patronising way he has sometimes, as if I was a baby compared to him.
I was just going to pull him up for it after we had got on our coats and caps, and were outside and the door shut, but before I had got farther than--'I say, youngster,'--he startled me rather by saying, in a very melancholy tone--
'It's too bad, Giles, isn't it? Her going away, and us hearing nothing of the little girl. I really thought she'd have asked her to tea too.'
'How you muddle your "her's" and "she's"!' I said. But of course I understood him. 'I think you muddle yourself too. If there's a mystery, and you know you'd be very disappointed if there wasn't, you couldn't expect the little girl to come to tea just as if everything was quite like everybody else about her.'
'No, that's true,' said he, consideringly. 'P'raps she's invisible sometimes, or p'raps she's like the "Light Princess," that they had to tie down for fear she'd float away, or p'raps----'
'She's invisible to us, anyway,' I interrupted, for, as I said, I was getting rather tired of Pete's fancies about the little girl, 'and so----'
But just as I got so far, we both stopped--we were passing the railing of the little girl's house at that moment, and voices talking rather loudly caught our ears. Peterkin touched my arm, and we stood quite still. No one could see us, it was too dark, and there was no lamp just there, though some light was streaming out from the lower windows of the house. One of them, the dining-room one, was a little open, even though it was a chilly evening.
It was so queer, our hearing the voices and almost seeing into the room, _just_ as we had been making up our minds that we'd never know anything about the little girl; it seemed so queer, that we didn't, at first, think of anything else. It wasn't for some minutes, or moments, certainly, that it came into my head that we shouldn't stay there peeping and listening. I'm afraid it wasn't a very gentlemanly sort of thing to do. As for Peterkin, I'm pretty sure he never had the slightest idea that we were doing anything caddish.