could mean.

The girl fancied it was saying--

"Alas! alas!"

Then she fled home, without stopping to pick up the lily.

II.

The girl lay sleeping in her little bedroom; she had left the window
open, because the night was warm. The moon was shining in, but it did
not wake her; neither did the little wood-elves, who had climbed up
the great vine, and had swarmed in at the window. Such numbers of
them! Some were sitting on the pillow stroking her hair, and
whispering into her ears, "Sleep, sleep, sleep," and others were
holding her eyelids fast closed, so that she could not open them to
see what was going on.

Some of them were dancing round in rings upon the soft white
coverlet, and others playing all sorts of pranks about the room.

The girl neither saw them nor heard them: she was too fast asleep for
that.

She did not even dream of them, but was dreaming of something very
different from wood-elves, or mountain-elves, or any other sort of
fay or fairy.

No; she dreamed that she heard some one singing--

[Illustration: "A LITTLE CHILD STANDING AT A DOOR, KNOCKING."]

"Up the stairs, if you will go,
You'll hear a tapping, tapping
At a door, for there you know
A little child is rapping,
Rapping, tapping, all the time,
Tapping, rapping, tapping."

"No, I don't know anything of the kind," said the girl, moving so
suddenly in her sleep that a score of wood-elves fell, heels over
head, from the bed to the floor.

"If you don't, if you'll go up
The staircase, you will find her;
She won't look round: she never does,
So you can get behind her,"

went on the song.

"And what will be the use of that?" murmured the girl in her dream.

"Why, you will help her, I suppose,
To reach up to the knocker.
You must not startle her, for that
Most certainly would shock her."

"It was the sea and the castle in the sunlight," said the girl, "and
now it is something quite as ridiculous: a little child standing at a
door knocking. That comes in the moonlight. And the music is going on
all the time."

She was speaking quite loudly now, and she suddenly opened her eyes,
in spite of the wood-elves, who crept down from the bed and hid
themselves in the folds of the curtains, for they did not want the
girl to know that they were there.

"It's the music that has waked me," said the girl, getting up in bed
and listening; "it's the same song over and over again, only I can't
ma