“Yes,” Arline spoke passionately, “this evening, before the signal came for us to march in, and take our places round the Council Fire, I knelt beside her for five minutes saying ‘Glory’ over and over, forming it big, with my lips close to her face; I want that to be the first word she says, if she ever does begin to speak, in honor of Welatáwesit, our Morning-Glory,” with a moist glance at Jessica, “who rescued her from drowning and kept the torch of life in her little body!”
“Yes, and who first:
“Called the Bluebird through her window
To sing its song within that dumb heart,”
quoted Gheezies. “Does Mŭnkwŏn remember the blank verse effusion in which she celebrated that playground incident?”
“Of course I do! But nobody has yet got sufficient poetic steam up”—Arline laughed—“as to write a really dramatic poem telling how she was saved from drowning in two feet and a half of water by a Camp Fire Girl and Eagle Scout.”
“Oh! we’ll leave that to the future airy flights of Kask, the Blue Heron,” chimed in Betty, smiling at Olive who sat facing her in this Council Fire crescent, grouped indoors upon a January night, around a ruddy hearth. “Blue Heron will surely try out her poetic pin-feathers, some day; it was the fear of losing them, I think, of being reduced to hissing instead of hooting, like that poor captive owl, which first induced her to become a Camp Fire Girl.”
“That may be—partly!” laughed Olive. “But all last summer while we were camping on those white, fairy Sugarloaf dunes, I was too much taken up with exercising my wings in other directions to think about little rhyming flights. And”—gasping slightly—“since we’ve been back in the city I’ve had plenty to do, too—with my father’s marriage and all that!”
Blue Heron, as she gazed into the fire, at the red velvet of its blazing, hickory back-log, was thinking dreamily of the pure wing-power for which she had prayed on that evening, more than six months before, when she sat, as a spectator, at a lakeside Council Fire, that she might soar into likeness to her mother. Of late, with a few human tumbles, she had been winging upward on pinions of tact and unselfishness that brooded gracefully over the crisis in her home life when her father gave a new mistress to the household where she had hoped to reign in that mother’s stead. Thus she helped Sybil to adjust herself, too.
In consequence, Olive already loved her stepmother whom, prior to the marriage, she hardly knew, all the more because the new wife evinced a cordial desire that Cousin Anne and Jessica should remain members of the family even after the latter graduated from high school, that is if the education in art which she was to pay for out of her wonderfully discovered legacy could be carried on in the city of Clevedon.