Running water! Invisible running water! The voice behind the scenes prompting the play,--the grim play of bat and rat and reptile in old Tory Cave, where the rocks wept, the little strolling sunbeams clapped their hands, and the great fungi, primrose-skirted, drooped over a drama never finished!
It was even more romantic than the girls had hoped for,--such romance as clings, cobweb-like, to melancholy.
Like a weak wind, truly, a sad wind blowing from nowhere, was the purl of that hidden streamlet whose mystery no man had penetrated--nor ever seen its flow--mournfully as cave tears it dripped upon the ears and hearts of the girls.
"Pshaw! Who cares for weeping rocks, though they look as if they were bursting with grief and ready to tear their pale hair--that queer growth clinging to them. Humph! Only crocodile tears, anyhow, like 'Alice in Wonderland!'" cried Ista, the laughing Eye of the White Birch Group, whose everyday name was Polly Leavitt.
"It's _not_ the tears and it's not that horribly sad lake with the little, blind, colorless fish in it, that I mind--it's the Bats!" screamed Una Grosvenor. "Oh-h!" as the mouse-like head of the cave mammal and its skinny wing almost brushed her face.
"Well! They're not brick-bats," came reassuringly from one of the boys, as the Togetherers ranged through the outer part of that vast Tory Cave--once the hiding-place of a political refugee, whose spirit seemed flitting among them in the filmy cave-fog which, dank and mournful, clung about the margin of that strange lake of fresh water where blind fish played.
Presumably fed by that cloistered brooklet, whose cell, far in, in an impenetrable recess, no human foot had ever trod, the lakelet had the floor to itself, so to speak, so that in places scouts with their lamps, and girls pairing off with their exploring brothers, one piloting eye between them, had difficulty in skirting it--without a ducking.
"Whew! a ducking in the dark--a cave-bath--horrible!" cried Pemrose. "Oh, mer-rcy! what--what is it?"
"Bah! Only a garter snake--a pretty fellow," laughed Studley, picking the slim, striped thing up from a corner of the blind lake where it was amphibiously basking, and letting it curl around his khaki arm, investigating the merit badges of the patrol leader.