“We ’re not strangers,” asserted the voice, calmly; “we are as familiar to you as your shadow,—­in fact, more so, come to think of it.  You have always known us, and so has your mother.  She ’d trust you to us, never fear!  Will you come?”

Marjorie considered a moment, and then said:  “Well, if you’re perfectly sure you ’ll take care of me, and that you ’ll bring me back in time, I guess I will.”

No sooner had she spoken than she felt herself raised from her place and borne away out of the crowded room in which she was,—­out, out into the world, as free as the air itself, and being carried along as though she were a piece of light thistle-down on the back of a summer breeze.

That she was travelling very fast, she could see by the way in which she out-stripped the clouds hurrying noiselessly across the sky.  One thing she knew,—­whatever progress she was making was due, not to herself (for she was making absolutely no effort at all, seeming to be merely reclining at ease), but was the result of some other exertion than her own.  She was not frightened in the least, but, as she grew accustomed to the peculiar mode of locomotion, became more and more curious to discover the source of it.

She looked about her, but nothing was visible save the azure sky above her and the green earth beneath.  She seemed to be quite alone.  The sense of her solitude began to fill her with a deep awe, and she grew strangely uneasy:  as she thought of herself, a frail little girl, amid the vastness of the big world.

How weak and helpless she was,—­scarcely more important than one of the wild-flowers she had used to tread on when she was n’t being hurried through space by the means of—­she knew not what.  To be sure, she was pretty; but then they had been pretty too, and she had stepped on them, and they had died, and she had gone away and no one had ever known.

“Oh, dear!” she thought, “it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to be killed (even if I am pretty), and no one would know it at all.  I wonder what is going to happen?  I wish I had n’t come.”

“Don’t be afraid!” said the familiar voice, suddenly.  “We promised to take care of you.  We are truth itself.  Don’t be afraid!”

“But I am afraid,” insisted Marjorie, in a petulant way, “and I ’m getting afraider every minute.  I don’t know where I ’m going, nor how I ’m being taken there, and I don’t like it one bit.  Who are you, anyway?”

For a moment she received no reply; but then the voice said:  “Hush! don’t speak so irreverently.  You are talking to the emissaries of a great sovereign,—­his Majesty the Sun.”

“Is he carrying me along?” inquired Marjorie presently, with deep respect.

“Oh, dear, no,” responded the voice; “we are doing that.  We are his vassals,—­you call us beams.  He never condescends to leave his place,—­he could not; if he were to desert his throne for the smallest fraction of a second, one could not imagine the amount of disaster that would ensue.  But we do his bidding, and hasten north and south and east and west, just as he commands.  It is a very magnificent thing to be a king—­”