Drooping towards the fire-glow, lips parted in entranced assurance, the slight figure became lost in the same dream which had held it months before in a February Pullman, while a daring flame, like a red-capped pearl diver, plunging into the mystery of that fairy thing, that gleaming stole about her neck brought out milky flashes of luster–together with those New Jerusalem tints, jade and gold and ruby.
Finished now it was, the pearl-woven prophecy–fair record to go down to posterity!
In faith–such faith as had inspired Penelope, faithful wife, of old, to weave and unravel her endless web, steadfast in the belief of her husband’s return, so the girlish fingers upon the loom had wrought the transcendent story to a finish.
To a finish even to the sprinkling of gold pieces, the yellow bonanza, coming from somewhere, to gorge the Thunder Bird, for its record flight; to a finish even to the celestial climax, the little blue powder-flash lighting up the dear, fair face of Mammy Moon!
But of one climax, more celestial still, Pemrose Lorry could not speak, not even to these her Camp Fire Sisters: of the evening of the second wreck–the wreck of hope after that third installment of a disappointing will had been read–when she had taken the four feet and a half of pearl poem to her father’s workshop, the grim hardware laboratory, and out of the home of light, which she herself hardly understood, in her young, young heart, had told him, doubtful of the future, that she knew the invention would win out–the Thunder Bird go where nothing earthly had ever gone before.
And he had whispered something–something surpassing–about a Wise Woman who saved a city.
It made sacred every thought now, and humbled it, too, in the breast of this little sixteen-year-old girl, with the mingled yarn in her nature–the mingling spice in her name.
Others had these fair stoles, too, the history of their girlish lives woven in pearls of typical purity, crossed by vivid representations of events. Drooping to their knees, in symbolic beauty, finishing with the soft leather fringes on which a breeze sweeping down the wide chimney played, they flashed here and there in the high colors of adventure–the quaintly symbolized adventure tale.
But none could match the theme of the two little primitive figures upon the mounttain-top, the inventor looking through a tube, the comet-like streak of fire above them: the opening of a highroad through Space,–the first step towards a federation of the heavenly bodies.
The record to go down to posterity!