There were six days left to practise in--only six. How the Little Girl practised! It was always quite alone by herself. She did it in a sensible, orderly way,--the leaps and strides first, whoops next, whistle last. The gardener's little boy's best clothes she kept hidden in the long grass, under the Golden Pippin tree, and on the fourth day she put them on. Oh, the agony of the fourth day! She came out of that practice period a wan, white, worn little thing that should _never_ have been a Boy. For it was heart-breaking work. Every instinct of the Little Girl's rebelled against it. It was terrible to leap and whoop and whistle; her very soul revolted. But it was life or death to her, and always she persevered. In those days lessons scarcely paid. They were only a pitiful makeshift. The Little Girl lived only in her terrible practice hours. She could not eat or sleep. She grew thin and weak. "I don't look like me at all," she told herself, on a chair before her mirror. "But that isn't the worst of it. I don't look like the Boy, either. Ugh! how I look! I wonder if the Angel would know me? It would be kind of dreadful not to have _anybody_ know you. Well, you won't be _you_ when you're the Boy, so prob'ly it won't matter." On the sixth day--the last thing--she cut her hair off. She did it with her eyes shut to give herself courage, but the snips of the shears broke her heart. The Little Girl had always loved her soft, shining hair. It had been like a beautiful thing apart from her, that she could caress and pet. She had made an idol of it, having nothing else to love. When it was all shorn off she crept out of the room without opening her eyes. After that the gardener's little boy's best clothes came easier to her, she found. And she could whoop and leap and whistle a little better. It was almost as if she had really made herself the Boy she should have been. Then the Shining Mother came, and the Ogre. The Little Girl--I mean the Boy--was waiting for them, swinging her--his--feet from a high branch of the Golden Pippin tree. He was whistling. "But I think I am going to die," he thought, behind the whistle. "I'm certain I am. I feel it coming on." Of course, after a little, there was a hunt everywhere for the Little Girl. Even little girls cannot slip out of existence like that, undiscovered. The beautiful green expanses were hunted over and over, but only a gardener's little boy in his best clothes, whistling faintly, was found. He fell out of the Golden Pippin tree as the field-servants went by, and they stopped to carry his limp little figure to the gardener's lodge. Then the hunt went forward again. The Shining Mother grew faint and sick with fear, and the Ogre strode about like one demented. It was hardly what was to be expected of the Shining Mother and the Ogre.