'Thank you,' she said with meek gratitude at the end, 'I thank you.'
'Il n'y a pas de quar,' replied Daddy, bowing; and the adventure came to an end. The others luckily had not heard it in full swing; they only caught the final phrase with which he said adieu. But it served its unwitting purpose admirably. It brought him back to the world about him. The spell was broken. All turned upon him instantly.
'Snay pas un morsow de bong.' Monkey copied his accent, using a sentence from a schoolboy's letter in Punch. 'It's not a bit of good.' Mother squelched her with a look, but Daddy, even if he noticed it, was not offended. Nothing could offend him to-night. Impertinence turned silvery owing to the way he took it. There was a marvellous light and sweetness about him. 'He is on air,' decided Mother finally. 'He's written his great Story—our story. It's finished!'
'I don't know,' he said casually to the others, as they stood talking a few minutes in the salon before going over to the Den, 'if you'd like to hear it; but I've got a new creature for the Wumble Book. It came to me while I was thinking of something else—-'
'Thinking of one thing while you were thinking of another!' cried
Monkey. It described exaccurately his state of mind sometimes.
'—-and I jotted down the lines on my cuff. So it's not very perfect yet.'
Mother had him by the arm quickly. Mlle. Vuillemot was hovering in his neighbourhood, for one thing. It seemed to her they floated over, almost flew.
'It's a Haystack Woman,' he explained, once they were safely in the
Den grouped about him. 'A Woman of the Haystack who is loved by the
Wind. That is to say, the big Wind loves her, but she prefers the
younger, handsomer little Winds, and—-'
He was not allowed to finish. The children laid his cuff back in a twinkling, drawing up the coat sleeve.
'But surely I know that,' Mother was saying. 'I've heard of her before somewhere. I wonder where?' Others were saying the same thing. 'It's not new.'