you won't let me in?"

Completely startled by this time, Jeanne turned and fled.

"He must be a fairy," she said by herself; "I'll never make fun of Dudu
any more--_never_. He must be a fairy, or how else could he have got up
from the terrace on to the window-sill all in a minute? And I don't
think a raven fairy would be nice at all; he'd be a sort of an imp, I
expect. I wouldn't mind now if Houpet was a fairy, he's so gentle and
loving; but Dudu would be a sort of ogre fairy, he's so black and
solemn. Oh dear, how he startled me! How did he get up there? I'm very
glad _I_ don't sleep in the tapestry room."

But when she got down to the brightly-lighted salon her cheeks were so
pale and her eyes so startled-looking that her mother was quite
concerned, and eagerly asked what was the matter.

"Nothing," said Jeanne at first, after the manner of little girls, and
boys too, when they do not want to be cross-questioned; but after a
while she confessed that she had run into the tapestry room on her way
down, and that the moonlight made the figures look as if they were
moving--and--and--that Dudu came and stood on the window-sill and
croaked at her.

"Dudu stood on the window-sill outside the tapestry room!" repeated her
father; "impossible, my child! Why, Dudu could not by any conceivable
means get up there; you might as well say you saw the tortoise there
too."

"If I had called him perhaps he _would_ have come too; I believe Dudu
and he are great friends," thought Jeanne to herself, for her mind was
in a queer state of confusion, and she would not have felt very much
astounded at anything. But aloud she only repeated, "I'm sure he was
there, dear papa."

And to satisfy her, her kind father, though he was not so young as he
had been, and the bad weather made him very rheumatic, mounted upstairs
to the tapestry room, and carefully examined the window inside and out.

"Nothing of the kind to be seen, my little girl," was his report.
"Master Dudu was hobbling about in the snow on his favourite terrace
walk as usual. I hope the servants give him a little meat in this cold
weather, by the by. I must speak to Eugene about it. What you fancied
was Dudu, my little Jeanne," he continued, "must have been a branch of
the ivy blown across the window. In the moonlight, and with the
reflections of the snow, things take queer shapes."

"But there is no wind, and the ivy doesn't grow so high up, and the ivy
could not have _croa