"It's no use talking," she said again and again, and the voice came from an empty-looking space between two pillars; "I never believed anything would happen, and now it has."
"Well," said Gerald kindly, "can we do anything for you? Because, if not, I think we ought to be going."
"Tea!" said the unseen Mabel scornfully. "Do you mean to say you'd go off to your teas and leave me after getting me into this mess?"
"Well, of all the unfair Princesses I ever met!" Gerald began. But Kathleen interrupted.
"Oh, don't rag her," she said. "Think how horrid it must be to be invisible!"
"I don't think," said the hidden Mabel, "that my aunt likes me very much as it is. She wouldn't let me go to the fair because I'd forgotten to put back some old trumpery shoe that Queen Elizabeth wore--I got it out from the glass case to try it on."
"Did it fit?" asked Kathleen, with interest.
"Not it--much too small," said Mabel. "I don't believe it ever fitted any one."
"I do really think perhaps we ought to go," said Gerald. "You see, it isn't as if we could do anything for you."
"You'll have to tell your aunt," said Kathleen kindly.
"No, no, no!" moaned Mabel invisibly; "take me with you. I'll leave her a note to say I've run away to sea."
"They might," said the stone floor between the pillars, "as stowaways, if nobody wanted a cabin boy--cabin girl, I mean."
"I'm sure you oughtn't," said Kathleen firmly.
"Really," said Gerald, "I don't know what the girl _can_ do. Let her come home with us and have----"
"But the aunt'll think something's happened to her."
"And she'll tell the police, and they'll look everywhere for me."
"They'll never find you," said Gerald. "Talk of impenetrable disguises!"
"I'm sure," said Mabel, "aunt would much rather never see me again than see me like this. She'd never get over it; it might kill her--she has spasms as it is. I'll write to her, and we'll put it in the big letter-box at the gate as we go out. Has any one got a bit of pencil and a scrap of paper?"
Gerald had a note-book, with leaves of the shiny kind which you have to write on, not with a blacklead pencil, but with an ivory thing with a point of real lead. And it won't write on any other paper except the kind that is in the book, and this is often very annoying when you are in a hurry. Then was seen the strange spectacle of a little ivory stick, with a leaden point, standing up at an odd, impossible-looking slant, and moving along all by itself as ordinary pencils do when you are writing with them.