they clapped their hands, and she escorted them up the Baby
Walk and back again, one at a time, putting an arm or a finger round
the very frail, setting their leg right when it got too ridiculous, and
treating the foreign ones quite as courteously as the English, though
she could not understand a word they said.

They behaved well on the whole, though some whimpered that she had not
taken them as far as she took Nancy or Grace or Dorothy, and others
jagged her, but it was quite unintentional, and she was too much of a
lady to cry out. So much walking tired her, and she was anxious to be
off to the ball, but she no longer felt afraid. The reason she felt no
more fear was that it was now night-time, and in the dark, you
remember, Maimie was always rather strange.

They were now loth to let her go, for, 'If the fairies see you,' they
warned her, 'they will mischief you--stab you to death, or compel you
to nurse their children, or turn you into something tedious, like an
evergreen oak.' As they said this they looked with affected pity at an
evergreen oak, for in winter they are very envious of the evergreens.

'Oh, la!' replied the oak bitingly, 'how deliciously cosy it is to
stand here buttoned to the neck and watch you poor naked creatures
shivering.'

This made them sulky, though they had really brought it on themselves,
and they drew for Maimie a very gloomy picture of the perils that would
face her if she insisted on going to the ball.

She learned from a purple filbert that the court was not in its usual
good temper at present, the cause being the tantalising heart of the
Duke of Christmas Daisies. He was an Oriental fairy, very poorly of a
dreadful complaint, namely, inability to love, and though he had tried
many ladies in many lands he could not fall in love with one of them.
Queen Mab, who rules in the Gardens, had been confident that her girls
would bewitch him, but alas! his heart, the doctor said, remained cold.
This rather irritating doctor, who was his private physician, felt the
Duke's heart immediately after any lady was presented, and then always
shook his bald head and murmured, 'Cold, quite cold.' Naturally Queen
Mab felt disgraced, and first she tried the effect of ordering the
court into tears for nine minutes, and then she blamed the Cupids and
decreed that they should wear fools' caps until they thawed the Duke's
frozen heart.

[Illustration: _Shook his bald head and murmured, "Cold, quite