The Stars in the Water

Her hair was hanging down over the pillow on which her head lay, so that Kathleen could scarcely tell which was the hair and which was the gold of the couch. There was a crown lying on a little table beside her, and so Kathleen guessed that she was the Queen. "Kathleen," said the Queen, "do you know why they have brought you here?"

"No, Your Majesty," said Kathleen. She was not a bit frightened, any more than she had been all along, and she knew that that was the way to speak to a queen, just as well as if she had never spoken to anybody else in her life.

"They brought you here, then," said the Queen, "to take care of my baby; but he'll not need you long, and then you can be going back home."

"I'm afraid," Kathleen said, "that I don't know how to take care of a baby very well. I might do something wrong with it. You see my mother died when I was born, and so I was the only baby that there ever was at our house, and I have hardly ever had anything to do with a real live baby."

"You've had something to do with them that was not alive, haven't you?" the Queen asked.

Kathleen smiled a little at that. "There were fifteen of them, I think," she said.

"Well, you'll be having no more trouble with this one," the Queen said, "than with any of those fifteen. Only do as you're told. I can't take care of it myself, because it's the law that it must have a nurse that's a mort—I mean it must have a nurse from outside this place. There's the baby in the cradle there. Try can you make him go to sleep."

Kathleen went to the cradle and looked at the baby. It was wide awake and it stared at her like a little owl. Except for that, it looked like any other baby. The way that the baby stared at her came nearer to making Kathleen afraid than anything that she had seen yet. But she took him out of the cradle, sat down on a low seat that she found, began to rock him gently, and sang an old song that her grandmother used to sing to her and that she had sung to her own fifteen babies many a time.