“I can’t—oh! I can’t be happy—unless I find out what’s doing it!”
She sobbed it aloud, now, in light, breathless, seafoam sobs—all irradiated, too—to the dewy flowers among which she stood; gay cottage tulips straggling among sweetbriars along by the wall, each red and yellow mite flashing as if, true to its legend, it had rocked a little elf in its cradle the night before.
There was not a flower in the garden whose legend was not in Una’s flower-basket brain.
This soft sea shell throbbing of the air about her, the faint, shrill piping—now, again, it was high, clear, metallic—yet strangely disembodied—fitted in with a dozen of them.
“It’s not earthly; it’s not,” she cried passionately to the tulips; “it’s t-too fairy-like—too unlike anything I ever heard ... but I can’t be happy, unless—”
A sweetbriar, herself, now, the unfinished protest a thorn in her brain, she was over the low wall—and through the dim shadow gate of the wood.
CHAPTER II
A “Roaring Buckie”
A pure, high note upon the air, a shrill, vibrating beat, as of a bird or a woodsman faintly calling! Wordlessly calling!
But it was not bird, nor woodsman. Una stood still, near a dark little pond, fringed with blue iris—May iris. She heard the birds with it.
“Goodness! can it be-e—am I dreaming that I’m Pemrose—Pemrose, ‘listening in’ on something, picking up sounds from the air with a wonderful ring—radio ring—that her father has made for her?”