“I’m much obliged to you, Ma’am, for your good advice to my Tommy.”

The Owl blinked sharply, as if she grudged shutting her eyes for an instant, and then stared on, but not a word spoke she.

“I don’t mean to intrude, Ma’am,” said the Tailor, “but I was wishful to pay my respects and gratitude.”

Still the Owl gazed in determined silence.

“Don’t you remember me?” said Tommy pitifully.  “I did everything you told me.  Won’t you even say good-bye?” and he went up towards her.

The Owl’s eyes contracted, she shuddered a few tufts of fluff into the shed, shook her wings, and shouting “Oohoo!” at the top of her voice, flew out upon the moor.  The Tailor and his sons rushed out to watch her.  They could see her clearly against the green twilight sky, flapping rapidly away with her round face to the pale moon.  “Good-bye!” they shouted as she disappeared; first the departing owl, then a shadowy body with flapping sails, then two wings beating the same measured time, then two moving lines still to the old tune, then a stroke, a fancy, and then—­the green sky and the pale moon, but the Old Owl was gone.

“Did she never come back?” asked Tiny in subdued tones, for the Doctor had paused again.

“No,” said he; “at least not to the shed by the mere.  Tommy saw many owls after this in the course of his life; but as none of them would speak, and as most of them were addicted to the unconventional customs of staring and winking, he could not distinguish his friend, if she were among them.  And now I think that is all.”

“Is that the very very end?” asked Tiny.

“The very very end,” said the Doctor.

“I suppose there might be more and more ends,” speculated Deordie—­“about whether the Brownies had any children when they grew into farmers, and whether the children were Brownies, and whether they had other Brownies, and so on and on.”  And Deordie rocked himself among the geraniums, in the luxurious imagining of an endless fairy tale.

“You insatiable rascal!” said the Doctor.  “Not another word.  Jump up, for I am going to see you home.  I have to be off early to-morrow.”

“Where?” said Deordie.

“Never mind.  I shall be away all day, and I want to be at home in good time in the evening, for I mean to attack that crop of groundsel between the sweet-pea hedges.  You know, no Brownies come to my homestead!”

And the Doctor’s mouth twitched a little till he fixed it into a stiff smile.

The children tried hard to extract some more ends out of him on the way to the Rectory; but he declined to pursue the history of the Trout family through indefinite generations.  It was decided on all hands, however, that Tommy Trout was evidently one and the same with the Tommy Trout who pulled the cat out of the well, because “it was just a sort of thing for a Brownie to do, you know!” and that Johnnie Green (who, of course, was not Johnnie Trout) was some unworthy village acquaintance, and “a thorough Boggart.”