When Dorothy passed the flower bed she gathered a handful and held them to her face with evident relish as they walked through the garden and found seats on the bench under the arbor.
They had been seated a few minutes when a messenger came from the public telephone office calling for John to answer a call from Pittsburgh. Knowing it was urgent, he excused himself, asking Dorothy to wait in the arbor, expecting to be gone five minutes. He was delayed at least twenty. When he returned she was peacefully sleeping on the bench. To awaken her he held the bunch of flowers to her face.
She smiled, sat up and stretching out her arms moved them up and down more rapidly than he thought humanly possible; the vibration or arc described, being one eighth of a complete circle. She bent forward, placing her lips above first one corolla then another. Her actions were unmistakable imitations of a humming bird. During the whole time she kept up an incessant humming or a chirpy little chatter, when John, almost in tears, taking her by the arm, awoke her.
"Oh! Oh! While you were away I slept and had the funniest dream. Come with me to the hammock under the oaks in the yard and I will tell it. Tell me the name of those strangely familiar flowers? Why they are the very ones I saw in my dream!"
THE DREAM.
"I sat on a bare twig, far from the ground, feeling safer at that giddy height than nearer earth, preening pinions, polishing beak and uttering the while a plaintive little chatter.
"There was a whirry buzz from above, a breeze of swift motion, a tremor of my perch, and beside me sat a gorgeous little knight, dressed even more brilliantly than I.
"His general body armor was of shining golden green, duller and giving gradual place to an opaque black underneath. He wore a crown of metallic violet and gorget of emerald green; his tail feathers were a brassy sheeny green and upon his breast and near his eyes were a few feathers of snowy white, as though he had been caught for a second in a snow storm.
"As he moved in the sunlight those colors shifted and changed until, if I had not been restrained by modesty, in ecstasy I must have cried;—'What a gorgeous being you are!' and he, doubtless reading my thoughts and more than pleased that I liked his appearance, moved yet closer and whispered words of love to me.
"From our perch we looked out upon the land, the foothill country. It was loved and kissed by the sun. The scent of fragrant blossoms filled the air and the fields were dotted with vari-colored flowers. Far above to the north was a mountain range, the highest peaks of which were covered with snow, and far below to the south was a lazy tropic river hemmed to the water's edge by forests of dense shade. There we never ventured though sometimes when the sun was hottest we flew to the very edge of the snow fields and sipped the most delicious nectar from the white wax-like flowers that grew on their moist border.