"Well, as matters turned out, I saw her again that very same day. Poor Baby-Belle! She got tired of climbing fences and jumping ditches, and in one field she was chased by a bull; so when she came to the highway, she determined to walk on it for a while. And no sooner had she started to do this than along came—who do you think?—Mrs. Brace-Gideon in her big, glittering barouche with its two big, glittering horses and the coachman and footman on the box.
"Baby-Belle tried to scrunch herself invisible, she told me later, but oh, no, Mrs. Brace-Gideon spotted her with her bright, bold eagle eye and commanded the coachman to stop.
"'Why, Baby-Belle Tuckertown, what are you doing so far from home?' Mrs. Brace-Gideon asked her. 'And all by yourself, too; why that's not proper! Climb right in, child; we will drive you home at once!'
"Of course, Baby-Belle couldn't think of any way not to climb in, so she had to. And it's my suspicion that she was greatly relieved. Running away from home is not the easy thing they claim it is in books. No, indeed it is not."
"Was it the brook water that gave you typhoid?" Julian asked.
"I'm very sure it was. Shortly afterwards, I began to feel ill and listless, and then very ill, oh, dreadful, and it seemed to go on and on.... So there I was lying on my bed one day, burning up with fever—I was alone in the room for a few minutes for some reason—when I heard a strange sound at the window and there was Baby-Belle flinging her leg over the sill.... My room was on the second floor, but I didn't think about that; my fever gave me so many queer thoughts and dreams that nothing seemed queerer than anything else.
"'Min?' Baby-Belle whispered to me, and I said: 'You better go away quick; I'm catching!' And Baby-Belle said: 'Pshaw, I don't give a hang. I've brought you that sea shell Uncle Ninian gave me; the one you always liked, remember? Here, take it.'
"Well, at that moment I didn't really want the shell or anything else—except to be lying in a snow field at the North Pole maybe—but when she pushed it into my hand, it did feel cool, oh, how cool it felt, and I thanked her. Then we heard footsteps in the hall and Baby-Belle skedaddled out the window. (She had borrowed the painter's ladder.)
"I had always admired the shell: a beautiful thing, exquisite in color, and smoothly shaped, like an egg. Baby-Belle told me how her Uncle Ninian had visited the Pacific isles; and once when he was in a boat on some lagoon, he had looked down into the water, down and down, and the water was as clear as if it wasn't there at all. The fishes might have been floating in air, Baby-Belle said he said, and they were all colors: gold and blue and purple and striped; and there were sea ferns and things, and way down, below the fishes and the ferns, was this beautiful shell. So Baby-Belle's Uncle Ninian decided to dive down and get it for his niece, and he did, though the water was much deeper than he'd thought, and he felt his lungs would burst before he regained the surface. When he gave the shell to Baby-Belle, he told her that if she held it to her ear, she would hear exactly the way the surf sounded on the barrier reef beyond the lagoon.
"After a while I put the shell to my own ear, and sure enough it seemed as if I could really hear the soft roar of surf on a distant reef; and when my dreams began again, they were all about the cool, clear water of the lagoon and the fishes drifting and the sea ferns waving, and I really believe, I really do, that that shell and the dreams it gave me helped me to recover."