Wet Magic
dryness as I did. And then just jump in. Keep your eyes shut. It's rather confusing if you don't; but there's no danger."
The children took the locks of hair, but no one regarded them with any confidence at all as lifesaving apparatus. They still hung back.
"You really are silly," said the sea lady indulgently. "Why did you meddle with magic at all if you weren't prepared to go through with it? Why, this is one of the simplest forms of magic, and the safest. Whatever would you have done if you had happened to call up a fire spirit and had had to go down Vesuvius with a Salamander round your little necks?"
She laughed merrily at the thought. But her laugh sounded a little angry too.
"Come, don't be foolish," she said. "You'll never have such a chance again. And I feel that this air is full of your horrid human microbes—distrust, suspicion, fear, anger, resentment—horrid little germs. I don't want to risk catching them. Come."
"No," said Francis, and held out to her the lock of her hair; so did Mavis and Bernard. But Kathleen had tied the lock of hair round her neck, and she said:
"I should have liked to, but I promised Bernard I would not do anything unless he said I might." It was toward Kathleen that the Mermaid turned, holding out a white hand for the lock.
Kathleen bent over the water trying to untie it, and in one awful instant the Mermaid had reared herself up in the water, caught Kathleen in her long white arms, pulled her over the edge of the pool, and with a bubbling splash disappeared with her beneath the dark water.
Mavis screamed and knew it; Francis and Bernard thought they did not scream. It was the Spangled Child alone who said nothing. He had not offered to give back the lock of soft hair. He, like Kathleen, had knotted it round his neck; he now tied a fur-
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