“Poor Treff!” She dimpled. “Didn’t we have a time teasing him into getting well after his awful note? I believe if the world came to an end to-morrow that boy would call it a ‘note’.... But I like a boy who has a brown speck in one gray eye, just one—his fun-mill!”
“Wonder if he’s got a new ‘bus’ yet?” speculated Una.
“And whether he’s ‘pulling any more bones’ with his radio outfit?” laughed the amateur. “Well! I’ll tell you what, I’m going to loop my aërial round the old ash-tree, this morning, just to make up for what it suffered through him!”
And now was the moment when that noble white ash, upon the garden side of the wall, might have rolled up the whites of its eyes, ruffled the pale lining of its leaves—if it had any left to ruffle—as a girl, clambering up, looped her aërial, her shining wire, as loftily as she could around the blackened trunk.
“Eh! What’s the merricle now?” grunted old Sods to the waking flowers, as he peeped, from a distance, over that garden wall.
And they nodded that they did not know, that they might be still dreaming, half open, as they saw that girl bounding lightly back over the wall to the brook’s edge, to slip a steel creeper upon her heel, the same that a girl might strap upon her daring heel, in icy weather—and don a listening halo.
“You—you’re not going any further into the wood?” Una probed the pines with glances, half fearful, half fascinated.
“No-o, ‘Peerie-Weerie?’ How are you going to stand sleeping out by the Long Trail to-night, if you don’t ‘side-dish’ your fancies?” Pemrose tilted the halo rakishly askew upon her little dark head. “Just look at the ring!” she gasped. “Isn’t it a winner?”
A winner it truly was; fraught every inch with glamour, the divine glamour of ingenuity.
“Four hundred turns of the finest hairwire wound round it, in this bobbin-like groove! Isn’t that—that elfin, if you like it?” The blue eyes danced. “And this ‘atomy’ lever which moves the cat-whisker to touch the crystal—father’s new crystal that takes the shine out of the others! And the miniature ‘bind-posts’, joints—three—one hooked on to my ground connection,” the amateur displayed her heel, “another to my aërial—the third to my hearing halo; father—oh! was there ever anybody like him—” it was a transfigured sob—“worked over these magnetic ear-phones, too, to make them extra sensitive.”