s in here," persisted Mark. "There's two
enchanted children. I've seen 'em!"

"Just as though," said Luke contemptuously. "Ma ain't a witch."

"Tain't ma. She don't know. They ain't visible to her. _She_ thinks
it's nothing but the best parlor. But it opens out, right into the
witch country,--not for her. 'Twill if we go. See if it don't."

He had got hold of her now; Luclarion could not resist that.
Anything might be true of that wonderful best room, after all. It
was the farthest Euxine, the witch-land, everything, to them.

So Mark turned the latch and they crept in

"We must open a shutter," Mark said, groping his way.

"Grashy will be back," suggested Luke, fearfully.

"Guess so!" said Mark. "She ain't got coaxed to take her sun-bonnet
off yet, an' it'll take her ninety-'leven hours to get it on again."

He had let in the light now from the south window.

The red carpet on the floor; the high sofa of figured hair-cloth,
with brass-headed nails, and brass rosettes in the ends of the hard,
cylinder pillows; the tall, carved cupboard press, its doors and
drawers glittering with hanging brass handles; right opposite the
door by which they had come in, the large, leaning mirror,
gilt--garnished with grooved and beaded rim and an eagle and
ball-chains over the top,--all this, opening right in from the
familiar every-day kitchen and their Lake Ontario,--it certainly
meant something that such a place should be. It meant a great deal
more than sixteen feet square could hold, and what it really was did
not stop short at the gray-and-crimson stenciled walls.

The two were all alone in it; perhaps they had never been all alone
in it before. I think, notwithstanding their mischief and
enterprise, they never had.

And deep in the mirror, face to face with them, coming down, it
seemed, the red slant of an inner and more brilliant floor, they saw
two other little figures. Their own they knew, really, but elsewhere
they never saw their own figures entire. There was not another
looking-glass in the house that was more than two feet long, and
they were all hung up so high!

"There!" whispered Mark. "There they are, and they can't get out."

"Of course they can't," said sensible Luclarion.

"If we only knew the right thing to say, or do, they might," said
Mark. "It's that they're waiting for, you see. They always do. It's
like the sleeping beauty Grashy told us."

"Then they've got to wait a hundred years," said Luke