Fuming helplessly in her great mahogany bed with its weird- carven bed-posts of pirate and sailor and siren, the sick woman lay staring blankly from the ceiling to the piazza railing and from the piazza railing to the dull gray sea when the vision first burst upon her.
"Why—why—Martha!" she screamed to her deaf woman. "There is a bright blue girl in the wrangle boat! And nobody is wrangling! They are coming right along, I mean! Scudding! And the girl is running the engine!"
From her own quick glance at the scene the deaf woman's answering voice came back as calm, as remote, as de- magnetized as the voice of an old letter.
"You sent for a girl to come, I believe," said the deaf woman.
"Yes, I know," fumed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "But I hardly dreamed for a moment that she really would!" 125
"What?" said the deaf woman.
"Never—dreamed—that—she—would!" repeated Mrs. Tome Gallien as economically as she could.
"Most things that you send for—seem to come," monotoned the deaf woman by no means unamiably. "There's no room left in the storeroom now for the last box of Japanese bric-a-brac, or the French wedding gown or the new-fangled fireless cooker. Where shall we put the girl?"
"In the fireless cooker!" snapped Mrs. Tome Gallien.
From the vague acquiescent smile on Martha's face it was evident that she sensed the spirit if not the words of the suggestion.