Arthur ran too. And as he ran he called, “Don’t be afraid, Silva. It’s Arthur Duncan from the Little House. Don’t mind me! I won’t hurt you.” But Silva only redoubled her speed. Arthur redoubled his. He was gaining swiftly on her. He entered the Moraine. On the other side Silva was just disappearing from it. “I tell you,” he called, “I’m not going to hurt you. Stop! I want to speak to you!” Silva did not answer. He heard a frenzied floundering among the underbrush. For the noise Silva made, she might have been an elephant. And then suddenly came silence--silence utter and complete. Had she fainted? What could be the matter? What a silly girl to act like that! Arthur rushed across the Moraine; penetrated the woods on the other side. Silva had disappeared as completely as though she had vanished into the air. Arthur stared about him like one waking from a dream. Then he began to search for her. Around rocks, into clumps of bushes he peered. Nobody. Nothing. “Silva Burle!” he called. “Silva! Silva! Where are you?” And then because he was genuinely alarmed, “Please answer. Please! I’m afraid you’re hurt.” Another search over a wider area. He mounted rocks this time. Remembering how Silva could climb, he stared upwards into trees. He crawled on hands and knees through every little thicket he found. And all the time he kept calling. Still nobody. Still nothing. As far as he could see, he was absolutely alone in that part of the wood. After half an hour, he gave it up. But he was a little alarmed and very much humiliated. He walked back over the trail to the Magic Mirror and all the time his head was bent in the deepest thought. He found the canoe; absently slid into it; mechanically paddled himself across the water. And all the time he continued to think hard. “It’s like a dream,” he thought. “I’d think anybody else was dreaming who told me this.” When he reached the barn, the whole mysterious episode seemed to float out of his mind in the great wave of drowsiness which suddenly beat through him. He fell immediately into slumber. But his sleep was full of dreams, all so strange that when he awoke in the morning, his experience of the night before threatened for a moment to take its place among them. “But I didn’t dream the peacocks or the deer,” he said to himself. “And I know I didn’t dream Silva!” He said nothing of his experience to any of the other children, though he found himself strangely tempted to tell Maida. But a kind of shyness held him back. At times it occurred to him that Silva might be lying injured somewhere in the woods. But always some instinct made him believe that this was not true. Halfway through the morning Granny Flynn sent him on an errand to the village. As he came out of the Post Office, he ran into Silva Burle just about to enter it. He tumbled off the wheel which he had just mounted. “Say,” he said without any other greeting, “where did you disappear to last night?”