“Oh, Mary,” said Una, awe-struck.

“I do—­true’s you’re alive.  There was an old man at Mrs. Wiley’s one day last fall.  He looked old enough to be anything.  She was asking him about cedar posts, if he thought they’d last well.  And he said, ’Last well?  They’ll last a thousand years.  I know, for I’ve tried them twice.’  Now, if he was two thousand years old who was he but your Wandering Jew?”

“I don’t believe the Wandering Jew would associate with a person like Mrs. Wiley,” said Faith decidedly.

“I love the Pied Piper story,” said Di, “and so does mother.  I always feel so sorry for the poor little lame boy who couldn’t keep up with the others and got shut out of the mountain.  He must have been so disappointed.  I think all the rest of his life he’d be wondering what wonderful thing he had missed and wishing he could have got in with the others.”

“But how glad his mother must have been,” said Una softly.  “I think she had been sorry all her life that he was lame.  Perhaps she even used to cry about it.  But she would never be sorry again—­never.  She would be glad he was lame because that was why she hadn’t lost him.”

“Some day,” said Walter dreamily, looking afar into the sky, “the Pied Piper will come over the hill up there and down Rainbow Valley, piping merrily and sweetly.  And I will follow him—­follow him down to the shore—­down to the sea—­away from you all.  I don’t think I’ll want to go—­Jem will want to go—­it will be such an adventure—­but I won’t.  Only I’ll have to—­the music will call and call and call me until I must follow.”

“We’ll all go,” cried Di, catching fire at the flame of Walter’s fancy, and half-believing she could see the mocking, retreating figure of the mystic piper in the far, dim end of the valley.

“No.  You’ll sit here and wait,” said Walter, his great, splendid eyes full of strange glamour.  “You’ll wait for us to come back.  And we may not come—­for we cannot come as long as the Piper plays.  He may pipe us round the world.  And still you’ll sit here and wait—­and wait.”

“Oh, dry up,” said Mary, shivering.  “Don’t look like that, Walter Blythe.  You give me the creeps.  Do you want to set me bawling?  I could just see that horrid old Piper going away on, and you boys following him, and us girls sitting here waiting all alone.  I dunno why it is—­I never was one of the blubbering kind—­but as soon as you start your spieling I always want to cry.”

Walter smiled in triumph.  He liked to exercise this power of his over his companions—­to play on their feelings, waken their fears, thrill their souls.  It satisfied some dramatic instinct in him.  But under his triumph was a queer little chill of some mysterious dread.  The Pied Piper had seemed very real to him—­as if the fluttering veil that hid the future had for a moment been blown aside in the starlit dusk of Rainbow Valley and some dim glimpse of coming years granted to him.