I'm
up, and be back before the stairs clock strikes again, and then it
will be done and can't be undone, and I shall know, and can't unknow."

So I took up the Rushlight and went as fast as I could.

I met a black beetle on the back-stairs, which was horrid, but I went
on. The side-door key is very rusty and very stiff; I had to put down
the Rushlight and use both my hands, and just then the clock struck
the half-hour, which was rather a good thing, for it drowned the noise
of the lock. It did not take me two minutes to run down the grass
path, and there were the Sunflowers.

I did it and it can't be undone, but I don't know what I wanted to
know after all, for the moon was shining in their faces, so they may
not have been really sound asleep. They are so tall, the Rushlight was
too heavy for me to lift right up, so I opened the door and took out
the candle, and flashed it in their faces. But they did not take as
much notice as I expected. Their glory leaves looked rather narrow and
tight, but they were not quite like the flower-women in the picture.

Sunflowers are alive, I know; they look so different when they are
dead. And I am sure they go to sleep, and wake up with candles, or Dr.
Brown would not have said so. But it is rather a quiet kind of being
alive and awake, I think. Something like Grandmamma, when she is very
stiff on Sunday afternoon, and goes to sleep upright in a chair, and
wakes up a little when her book drops. But not alive and awake like
Margery's black cat, which must have heard me open the side-door, and
followed me without my seeing it. It did frighten me, with jumping out
of the bushes, and looking at me with yellow eyes!

Then I saw another eye. The eye of a moth, who was on one of the
leaves. A most beautiful fellow! His coloured wings were rather tight,
like the Sunflower's glory leaves, but he was wide awake--watching the
candle.

I should have got back to bed quicker if it had not been for Margery's
black cat and the night-moths. I wanted to get the cat into the house
again, but she would not follow me, and the moths would; and I had
such hard work to keep them out of the Rushlight.

There was nothing to drown the noise the key made when I locked the
side-door again, and when I got to the bottom of the back-stairs, I
saw a light at the top, and there was Grandmamma in the most awful
night-cap you can imagine, with a candle in one hand, and the
watchman's rattle in the other.