"_You're_ too long to go home yet," said Kathleen sadly, and then Mabel remembered.
She lay with closed eyes--then suddenly she stirred and cried out:--
"Oh! Cathy, I feel so funny--like one of those horn snakes when you make it go short to get it into its box. I am--yes--I know I am----"
She was; and Kathleen, watching her, agreed that it was exactly like the shortening of a horn spiral snake between the closing hands of a child. Mabel's distant feet drew near--Mabel's long, lean arms grew shorter--Mabel's face was no longer half a yard long.
"You're coming right--you are! Oh, I am so glad!" cried Kathleen.
"I know _I_ am," said Mabel; and as she said it she became once more Mabel, not only in herself, which, of course, she had been all the time, but in her outward appearance.
"You are all right. Oh, hooray! hooray! I _am_ so glad!" said Kathleen kindly; "and now we'll go home at once, dear."
"Go home?" said Mabel, slowly sitting up and staring at Kathleen with her big dark eyes. "Go home--like that?"
"I'm all right," said Kathleen. "Come on."
"Do you mean to say you don't know?" said Mabel. "Look at yourself--your hands--your dress--everything."
Kathleen looked at her hands. They were of marble whiteness. Her dress, too--her shoes, her stockings, even the ends of her hair. She was white as new-fallen snow.
"What is it?" she asked, beginning to tremble. "What am I all this horrid colour for?"
"Don't you see? Oh, Cathy, don't you see? You've _not_ come right. You're a statue still."
"I'm not--I'm alive--I'm talking to you."
"I know you are, darling," said Mabel, soothing her as one soothes a fractious child. "That's because it's moonlight."
[Illustration: "WHAT IS IT?" SHE ASKED, BEGINNING TO TREMBLE. "WHAT AM I ALL THIS HORRID COLOUR FOR?"]
"Don't you see," said Mabel gently, taking her white marble hand, "you're not all right? It's moonlight, and you're a statue, and you've just come alive with all the other statues. And when the moon goes down you'll just be a statue again. _That's_ the difficulty, dear, about our going home again. You're just a statue still, only you've come alive with the other marble things. Where's the dinosaurus?"
"In his bath," said Kathleen, "and so are all the other stone beasts."