THE SPELL OF THE MOONBEAMS
It was a night of white moonlight; a languorous night. It was a night of impenetrable shadows, deep and black; and, where light and shadow met and merged, the treetops were fringed against the sky in tracery as delicate as a cameo. And there was fragrance in the air, exotic, exquisite, the fragrance of growing things, of semi-tropical flowers and trees and shrubs. And very faint and soft there fell upon the ear the gentle lapping of the water on the shore, as though in her mother tenderness nature were breathing a lullaby over her sea-cradled isle.
On a verandah of great length and spacious width, moon-streaked where the light stole in through the row of ornamental columns that supported the roof and through the interstices of vine-covered lattice work, checkering the flooring in fanciful designs, a girl raised herself suddenly on her elbow from a reclining chair, and, reaching out her hand, laid it impulsively on that of another girl who sat in a chair beside her.
"Oh, Dora," she breathed, "it's just like fairyland!"
Dora Marlin smiled quietly.
"What a queer little creature you are, Polly!" she said. "You like it here, don't you?"
"I love it!" said Polly Wickes.
"Fairyland!" Dora Marlin repeated the word. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were a real fairyland just like the stories they used to read to us as children?"
Polly Wickes nodded her head slowly.
"I suppose so," she said; "but I never had any fairy stories read to me when I was a child, and so my fairyland has always been one of my own—one of dreams. And this is fairyland because it's so beautiful, and because being here doesn't seem as though one were living in the same world one was born in at all."