"Curtain! curtain! quick!" cried Beauty-Mabel, in a voice that wasn't Mabel's or the Beauty's. "Jerry--those things _have_ come alive. Oh, whatever _shall_ we do?"
Gerald in his hearthrugs leaped to his feet. Again that flat padded applause marked the swish of cloths on clothes-line as Jimmy and Kathleen drew the curtains.
"You've done it this time!" said Gerald to the pink, perspiring Mabel. "Oh, bother these strings!"
"Can't you burst them? _I've_ done it?" retorted Mabel. "I like that!"
"Oh, it's all right," said Mabel, "Come on. We must go and pull the things to pieces--then they _can't_ go on being alive."
"It's your fault, anyhow," said Gerald with every possible absence of gallantry. "Don't you see? It's turned into a wishing ring. I _knew_ something different was going to happen. Get my knife out of my pocket--this string's in a knot. Jimmy, Cathy, those Ugly-Wuglies have come alive--because Mabel wished it. Cut out and pull them to pieces."
Jimmy and Cathy peeped through the curtain and recoiled with white faces and staring eyes. "Not me!" was the brief rejoinder of Jimmy. Cathy said, "Not much!" And she meant it, any one could see that.
And now, as Gerald, almost free of the hearth-rugs, broke his thumb-nail on the stiffest blade of his knife, a thick rustling and a sharp, heavy stumping sounded beyond the curtain.
"They're going out!" screamed Kathleen--"_walking_ out--on their umbrella and broomstick legs. You can't stop them, Jerry, they're too awful!"
"Everybody in the town'll be insane by to-morrow night if we _don't_ stop them," cried Gerald. "Here, give me the ring--I'll unwish them."
[Illustration: A LIMP HAND WAS LAID ON HIS ARM.]
He caught the ring from the unresisting Mabel, cried, "I wish the Uglies _weren't_ alive," and tore through the door. He saw, in fancy, Mabel's wish undone, and the empty hall strewed with limp bolsters, hats, umbrellas, coats and gloves, prone abject properties from which the brief life had gone out for ever. But the hall was crowded with live things, strange things--all horribly short as broomsticks and umbrellas are short. A limp hand gesticulated. A pointed white face with red cheeks looked up at him, and wide red lips said something, he could not tell what. The voice reminded him of the old beggar down by the bridge who had no roof to his mouth. These creatures had no roofs to their mouths, of course--they had no----