“You will not hear those words after you leave our valley. For, in the region through which you must pass, Aster’s friends have no power; you will have to depend wholly upon yourself. And”--as the waters of the little brook, by whose margin they were standing, began to ripple along faster, and murmur louder, while the musical fountains began to play, and the birds to sing--“and now you must leave us: everything is in readiness, and the time has come.” Then, with Eva in their midst, the children began to walk slowly along the brook, which no longer brought Aster’s voice with it. On they went, through the calm valley; not, however, as Eva had expected, to the door in the rock through which she had entered, and which she had never been able to find again,--though she had looked for it the day before, but in the opposite direction,--towards the cavern in which the waters of the brook disappeared. She asked why she was not to be allowed to seek for Aster among the rocky, stony wastes in which he had disappeared. “Because that is all over, and you cannot go back into the Past,” was the reply. “Nothing, which has once happened there, or been seen there, remains in Shadow-Land.” They had come, by this time, to the cavern, and Eva saw that its roof was higher above the brook than it had been the day before; and that, floating on the water, which was here as smooth and still as glass, there were a great many pure white lilies, and that every now and then a speckled trout would jump from the water, and send a shower of crystal drops to sparkle on the green leaves around the white lilies. “There lies your way,” the children said, pointing to the cavern and the brook. “But we must give you the means of going down the brook to the place where it meets the Enchanted River. Beyond that we cannot help you. We can only send you, in our boat, down the brook.” At these words Eva looked up in great surprise, for no boat was to be seen, and she could not imagine where one was to come from. But then one of the children clapped her hands, and, as she did so, a lily-bud slowly rose from the water, and then opened, till it was larger and whiter than any of the other lilies. And then, while all looked on in silence, the pure white leaves of the lily fell into the water and melted away in it like snow; and then another waved her hands in the air, and immediately, on the stalk from which the lily-petals had fallen, there grew a pod. And when the pod had stopped growing, a third, stooping by the brook, dipped her hands into the water, and the lily-pod detached itself from its stem, and came floating to the bank.