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As for the ragged children, she saw them now as fairy children clothed in the finest of laces and playing, not with pebbles, but with precious jewels so brilliant that they fairly dazzled the eyes. Dame Pridgett managed to keep her mouth shut and acted in such a way that the fairies never suspected she had used the magic ointment, and could now see them as they were.
He was peeping into the butter firkins, smelling and tasting, and wherever he found some very good butter he helped himself to a bit of it and put it in a basket he carried on his arm. Dame Pridgett pressed up close to him and looked into his basket, and there in it was a dish almost full of butter. When the good dame saw that, she was so indignant that she quite lost all prudence.
One day she managed to upset the basin with her elbow as though by accident, though really by design. She gave a cry and bent over to pick up the basin, and as she did so, unseen by her mistress, she rubbed her right eye with the finger that still had some salve left on it. When Dame Pridgett straightened up and looked about her she could hardly keep from crying out again at what she saw.
He rode up to her door and knocked without getting off his horse, and when Dame Pridgett opened the door he looked down at her with such queer pale eyes he almost frightened her. "Are you Dame Pridgett?" he asked. "I am," answered the dame. "And do you go about nursing sick people?" "Yes, that is my business." "Then you are the one I want. My wife is ill, and I am seeking some one to nurse her."
The baby was so queer looking that Dame Pridgett did not much care to handle it, but still she had come there as a nurse, and she would do what was required of her. The little man showed her where the kitchen was, and she heated some water and then went back to the bedroom and took up the baby to wash it.
She would have liked to try some of it on her own eyes, for her sight was somewhat dim, but the mother watched her so closely that she never had a chance to use it. Now, every day, after Dame Pridgett had washed the baby, she left the basin on a chair beside her while she rubbed the salve on the child's eyes.
Dame Pridgett had to shut her eyes to keep from growing dizzy and falling off. So it was that when she reached home she knew no more of the way she had come than she knew of the way she had gone. But this was not the last Dame Pridgett saw of the fairy folk.
They rode along for what seemed a long distance, and then they stopped before a poor, mean-looking house. Dame Pridgett stared about her, and she did not know where they were. She knew she had never seen the place before. In front of the house were some rocks with weeds growing among them, and a pool of muddy water, and a few half-dead trees. It was a dreary place.
But Dalim Kumar and his young wife lived in happiness forever after, and when the old Rajah died Dalim Kumar became Rajah in his stead, and his own son ruled after him as Surai Bai and he had desired. Dame Pridgett was a fat, comfortable, good-natured old body, and her business in life was to go about nursing sick folk and making them well again.
"Where do you live?" asked the dame, for the man was a stranger to her, and she knew he was not from thereabouts. "Oh, I come from over beyond the hills, but I have no time to talk. Give me your hand and mount up behind me." Dame Pridgett gave him her hand, not because she wanted to, but because, somehow, when he bade her do so she could not refuse.
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