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.

“Who knows when they began?”

“They do everything that we do,” said Luclarion, her imagination kindling, but as under protest.  “If we could jump in perhaps they would jump out.”

“We might jump at ’em,” said Marcus.  “Jest get ’em going, and may-be they’d jump over.  Le’s try.”

So they set up two chairs from Lake Ontario in the kitchen doorway, to jump from; but they could only jump to the middle round of the carpet, and who could expect that the shadow children should be beguiled by that into a leap over bounds?  They only came to the middle round of their carpet.

“We must go nearer; we must set the chairs in the middle, and jump close.  Jest shave, you know,” said Marcus.

“O, I’m afraid,” said Luclarion.

“I’ll tell you what!  Le’s run and jump!  Clear from the other side of the kitchen, you know.  Then they’ll have to run too, and may-be they can’t stop.”