out! I'll kick you! I'll bite you if you
don't! Let me go to Duncan, I tell you, you wicked creature! I'll get
out of the window!" and Elsie flew at it, and began tugging away at the
strap.

The gentleman took her up in his arms and flung her down on the seat,
where Elsie lay screaming and sobbing, and beating the cushions with her
hands, grinding her teeth, and flinging herself about like a mad thing.

They let her go on as she would for a time. After a while the gentleman
bent over her, and, catching hold of her wrists with the firm grasp of
his powerful hands, made her sit upright. "Listen," he said, putting his
head close to her face, and looking so ugly and evil that Elsie felt as
if she could have struck him; "we have had enough of this. If you are
wise you will behave properly, then no harm will come to you. If you
make a disturbance, you will bring down upon yourself a fate that you
will not like."

It was not so much the words themselves as the menacing way they were
hissed in the child's ear that made them so terrible.

But Elsie was not then thinking of herself, and no threat against her
took any hold upon her mind. She returned him a sulky glance of
defiance, which made him scowl.

Then Mrs. Donaldson came and sat on the other side of Elsie, and began
speaking.

"So long as you do what we bid you, your brother is safe," she said, in
a voice of quiet decision. "He is quite at our mercy, and will be well
cared for, if you are good. Any naughtiness on your part will only
injure him. The moment you misbehave he will be turned into the streets,
to find his way home as best he can. He will be brought to you in a week
if you have not been the cause of his being lost in the meantime."

"I don't believe you," Elsie said sulkily; "you are too far from Duncan
to hurt him."

Mrs. Donaldson smiled. "You can do just as you like," she said. "I only
warn you. Duncan is in the hands of my people. I can send them a
message all the way from London in five minutes, and before you know
anything about it they will have done with Duncan whatever I tell them.
You forget that I am the 'fairy mother.'"

Then flashed through Elsie's mind something she had heard her mother and
granny talking about, which granny would not believe. It was about a
wire which took messages all over the world as quickly as you could
write them. Her mother had tried to explain it, but granny declared it
sounded like some wicked thing done by evil