ld do so, it
would that instant wither up and cease. If an army of them had rushed
to invade it, it would have melted away on the edge of it, and ceased
like a dying wave.--She even imagined that the moon was slowly coming
nearer and nearer down the sky to take her and freeze her to death in
her arms. The wise woman, too, she felt sure, although her cottage
looked asleep, was watching her at some little window. In this,
however, she would have been quite right, if she had only imagined
enough--namely, that the wise woman was watching OVER her from the
little window. But after all, somehow, the thought of the wise woman
was less frightful than that of any of her other terrors, and at length
she began to wonder whether it might not turn out that she was no
ogress, but only a rude, ill-bred, tyrannical, yet on the whole not
altogether ill-meaning person. Hardly had the possibility arisen in her
mind, before she was on her feet: if the woman was any thing short of
an ogress, her cottage must be better than that horrible loneliness,
with nothing in all the world but a stare; and even an ogress had at
least the shape and look of a human being.

She darted round the end of the cottage to find the front. But, to her
surprise, she came only to another back, for no door was to be seen.
She tried the farther end, but still no door. She must have passed it
as she ran--but no--neither in gable nor in side was any to be found.

A cottage without a door!--she rushed at it in a rage and kicked at the
wall with her feet. But the wall was hard as iron, and hurt her sadly
through her gay silken slippers. She threw herself on the heath, which
came up to the walls of the cottage on every side, and roared and
screamed with rage. Suddenly, however, she remembered how her screaming
had brought the horde of wolves and hyenas about her in the forest,
and, ceasing at once, lay still, gazing yet again at the moon. And then
came the thought of her parents in the palace at home. In her mind's
eye she saw her mother sitting at her embroidery with the tears
dropping upon it, and her father staring into the fire as if he were
looking for her in its glowing caverns. It is true that if they had
both been in tears by her side because of her naughtiness, she would
not have cared a straw; but now her own forlorn condition somehow
helped her to understand their grief at having lost her, and not only a
great longing to be back in her comfortable home, but a