“Of course there isn’t any kid,” said she.
“Dear, kind, pretty Fairy,” Edwin began again.
“Didn’t you hear all I was saying to you yesterday, when the water was dripping from the ceiling all over the room?”
“From nineteen several spots. Of course I did.”
“You mean that you’re tired of having things happen when you do your sums correctly? You prefer the old way!”
“Yes, _please_,” said Edwin, “if you’re sure you don’t mind? I know you meant it for kindness, but, oh, it is most beastly, when you get into the thick of it.” He was thinking of the elephants, I fancy.
“I only did it to please you,” said the Fairy pouting. “I’ll make everything as it was before. Does _that_ please you? And there’s your third wish. You know we always give three wishes. It’s customary in the profession. What would you like?”
Edwin had not attended properly to this speech, so he had only heard “as it was before” and then “What would you like?”
So he said, “I should like to see you again some day.”
The Arithmetic Fairy smiled at him, and her beauty grew more and more radiant. She had not expected this. “I made sure you would ask for a pony or a cricket bat or a pair of white mice,” she said. “You _shall_ see me again, Edwin. Goodbye.”
And the bright vision faded away in a dim mist of rosy permutations.
When Edwin got home he heard that a model engine had been discovered in the larder, and had been given to his younger brother. There are some wrongs, some sorrows, to which even a pen like mine cannot hope to do justice.
Edwin is now a quiet-looking grown-up person in a black frock coat; and his hair is slowly withdrawing itself from the top of his learned head. I suppose it feels itself unworthy to cover so great a brain. The fairy has been with him, unseen, this many a year. The other day he saw her.
He had been Senior Wrangler, of course; that was nothing to Edwin. And he was Astronomer Royal, but that, after all, he had a right to expect.
But it was when he took breath from his researches one day, and suddenly found that he had invented a bran-new Hypernebular Hypothesis—that he thought of the Fairy, and thinking of her, he beheld her. She was lightly poised above a pile of books based on Newton’s “Principia,” and topped with his own latest work, “The Fourth and Further Dimensions.” He knew her at once, and now he appreciated, more than ever in his youth, the radiance of her eyes and of her wings, for now he understood it.