Around this U-te-yan, Flower had created her masterpiece, a ring-like bed in three-cornered sections, peopled only by horological flowers, as her books called them, those that closed sleepily at night, to open at various hours of the morning, energetically or lazily, as the case might be.
To the lovely flower clock, the blooming democracy, wild flowers, even weeds, were admitted, side by side with garden aristocrats, in order to find a flower, sometimes two or three, whose waking or sleeping habits corresponded to the numbers upon the dial’s face—to the sunny hours counted out by the pointing of the shadowy dial finger.
The flower clock had suddenly developed a tongue. The vague hum pursued her here. Pale, spring poppy, uncurling dandelion, caught it, held it—and winked at her over its mystery.
“If—if I were Pemrose now, I’d go right on into the wood, and find out where it comes from—what’s making it,” she murmured to those waking flowers. “The truth is, I’m too—t-too ‘funky’,” with a little deprecatory shrug. “That—that’s why father won’t hear of my going hiking, camping with the other girls this summer; he says I never would stand the sleeping out at night—even for a few nights. And Treff, my madcap cousin Treff, says I’d be such a ‘weer’ I’d turn them all ‘wuzzy’,”—a low laugh—“his barbarous college slang!
“He—he’s coming over to take Pemrose for a little flight, this morning, a little ‘air-hop’, as he calls it, before breakfast. I—I daren’t go up with him in his aëroplane, to hear voices among the clouds—his new radio outfit. That must be weird. But—this is weirder!” The girl’s lips curved silently. “And yet—and yet that’s not the word, either; it’s too sweet. Gracious! Now I hear it, now I d-don’t.” She stole forward a step, bending her ear towards the intoning pines.
“Now—now it’s like a wandering organ note. Oh! am I listening in on anything by radio—a new sort of radio ‘bug’?” with the faintest whiff of laughter. “Am I awake, at all? I’d give worlds—worlds—to go on into the wood, find out what it is—what’s making it. But I’ve seldom been into that pine wood, alone. Never—at this hour.”
Yet, as if that dulcet, wavy murmur, now high-pitched, now low-pitched, faint, yet audible—increasingly audible—in the still May morning, were a luminous belt, an irresistible power-belt, drawing her, Una was moving slowly—vaguely—towards the wood.
She reached the low stone wall—the dark skirts of the passive pines were only fifty feet away.
Each gray stone in that rough wall was now a ruby, reflecting the wonderful amethyst lights in the sky—wings of that mild young sun which had risen so like a moon calf.
Suddenly her hands clutched each other convulsively. Was she masquerading, too? The morning had, all in a moment, become dim; and she was the ghost of a girl standing down, in a mist, by a seashore—holding a hollow sea shell to her ear.