"it is more beautiful than you can imagine, and perhaps this
evening it may not be so lovely. I believe I could carry you,
don't you think I could?" Clara looked at her and shook her head.
"Why, Heidi, what can you be thinking of! you are smaller than I
am. Oh, if only I could walk!"
Heidi looked round as if in search of something, some new idea
had evidently come into her head. Peter was sitting up above
looking down on the two children. He had been sitting and
staring before him in the same way for hours, as if he could not
make out what he saw. He had destroyed the chair so that the
friend might not be able to move anywhere and that her visit
might come to an end, and then a little while after she had
appeared right up here under his very nose with Heidi beside her.
He thought his eyes must deceive him, and yet there she was and
no mistake about it.
Heidi now looked up to where he was sitting and called out in a
peremptory voice, "Peter, come down here!"
"I don't wish to come," he called in reply.
"But you are to, you must; I cannot do it alone, and you must
come here and help me; make haste and come down," she called
again in an urgent voice.
"I shall do nothing of the kind," was the answer.
Heidi ran some way up the slope towards him, and then pausing
called again, her eyes ablaze with anger, "If you don't come at
once, Peter, I will do something to you that you won't like; I
mean what I say."
Peter felt an inward throe at these words, and a great fear
seized him. He had done something wicked which he wanted no one
to know about, and so far he had thought himself safe. But now
Heidi spoke exactly as if she knew everything, and whatever she
did know she would tell her grandfather, and there was no one he
feared so much as this latter person. Supposing he were to
suspect what had happened about the chair! Peter's anguish of
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