He did not know whether he spoke or ate during that dead week, but for the most part he was silent and refused his food. Still, his absent-mindedness was an old tale by now, so Marget got little satisfaction out of that. The only difference was that he would not sit in the kitchen any more, and no amount of abuse could fetch him back. Perhaps he was afraid of the chair that was like a coffin in his eyes; at all events, he refused to sit in it again. Instead, he sat in his bedroom on his bed, staring for ever at his magic tree. But there was no magic about it now, because the fiddle had gone away, and without it the fairy glades would never let him in. Yet still he sat there, staring and staring, while the sun climbed the morning hills, touched the house in passing with a golden wing, and fled away to break into colours in the west. Always he sat with his fingers lightly clasped, as if something were lying within them on his knee. So, as it happened, Marget found her vengeance a poor thing, after all. The scene that she had looked for hung fire and never came off. There was nothing exciting in the way of pleading and tears; nothing, in fact, except this absolute blank, risen like a fog between her victim and herself. Even the children felt that the situation had fallen flat. Instead of “carrying on,” as they had hoped, Gran’pa had been as dull as a dead fish. He hadn’t even spoken, nor did he mean to speak. He had not given them any sort of scope for their peculiar powers. Why, you might almost have thought that he didn’t even know! Marget began to brag of her guilt at last, but it was impossible to tell whether he took it in. He did not seem to notice her vivid accounts of how the fiddle had met its end. Sometimes she was exasperated into contradicting her own tales, but as none of them seemed to reach him that did not matter very much. She was chiefly puzzled, however, because he never tried to get the fiddle back. The cheerful hide-and-seek that she had planned couldn’t be played because the principal person concerned in it wouldn’t take part. He never went to the water-butt to peer into its depths. He never poked about the ashheap or raked the fire. He did not even dig about the garden, as if hoping to find it among the flowers. He knew Marget would never give it as clean a burial as that. All that he did was to shut himself up and stare, until even she began to feel uneasy in her mind. It would be a poor victory if he was too crushed to care, and in any case she did not want him helpless on her hands. Daft as he was, he was of use to her sometimes, a caretaker for the house when she wanted to be out, a stick to frighten importunate beggars, a hodman to lift a load; and always a peg upon which to hang her tongue. If she drove him clean crazed, he would be a greater burden than before, and certainly it looked as though that might be the end. So it came about that, after a week, there was a miracle for which he had not even prayed.