“He—he’s coming over to take Pemrose for a little flight, this morning, a little ‘air-hop’, as he calls it, before breakfast. I—I daren’t go up with him in his aëroplane, to hear voices among the clouds—his new radio outfit. That must be weird. But—this is weirder!” The girl’s lips curved silently. “And yet—and yet that’s not the word, either; it’s too sweet. Gracious! Now I hear it, now I d-don’t.” She stole forward a step, bending her ear towards the intoning pines.
“Now—now it’s like a wandering organ note. Oh! am I listening in on anything by radio—a new sort of radio ‘bug’?” with the faintest whiff of laughter. “Am I awake, at all? I’d give worlds—worlds—to go on into the wood, find out what it is—what’s making it. But I’ve seldom been into that pine wood, alone. Never—at this hour.”
Yet, as if that dulcet, wavy murmur, now high-pitched, now low-pitched, faint, yet audible—increasingly audible—in the still May morning, were a luminous belt, an irresistible power-belt, drawing her, Una was moving slowly—vaguely—towards the wood.
She reached the low stone wall—the dark skirts of the passive pines were only fifty feet away.
Each gray stone in that rough wall was now a ruby, reflecting the wonderful amethyst lights in the sky—wings of that mild young sun which had risen so like a moon calf.
Suddenly her hands clutched each other convulsively. Was she masquerading, too? The morning had, all in a moment, become dim; and she was the ghost of a girl standing down, in a mist, by a seashore—holding a hollow sea shell to her ear.
“I can’t—oh! I can’t be happy—unless I find out what’s doing it!”
She sobbed it aloud, now, in light, breathless, seafoam sobs—all irradiated, too—to the dewy flowers among which she stood; gay cottage tulips straggling among sweetbriars along by the wall, each red and yellow mite flashing as if, true to its legend, it had rocked a little elf in its cradle the night before.
There was not a flower in the garden whose legend was not in Una’s flower-basket brain.
This soft sea shell throbbing of the air about her, the faint, shrill piping—now, again, it was high, clear, metallic—yet strangely disembodied—fitted in with a dozen of them.
“It’s not _earthly_; it’s not,” she cried passionately to the tulips; “it’s t-too fairy-like—too unlike anything I ever heard ... but I can’t be happy, unless—”