Nathalie, thus pressed, told of the Pilgrim Rally, the coming of the Boy Scouts, the Pioneer dance, and then lastly how she had accepted Miss I Can, the motto of the organization, as a very dear friend, and how she was trying to live up to it. The girl could not account for the feeling that made her sacrifice her usual reserve in regard to her inner life, and tell this make-believe princess about what she was trying to do. In thinking it over when by herself, she concluded that perhaps it was the lesson in this little motto that she had intuitively felt might help the little prisoner in the tower.
“Oh, I wish you would get up a story club for me!” exclaimed the blood royal, as Nathalie finally ended her Pioneer recital by telling about the story club the girls had formed to tell stories to the little children in the colored settlement.
“Wouldn’t it be just lovely! And they would all be real live girls, too, not story-book people, for oh, Miss Page, I get so tired of book folks! I want to meet just real every-day girls. That is why I coaxed my mother to get the doctor to have you come here and tell me stories, but don’t say another word about telling me stories,” she lowered her voice, “for that was just a trick to get Mother to consent. When I want a thing I just keep plaguing her and then she lets me have my way.”
“Oh, but you ought to tell your mother everything,” exclaimed her new friend, somewhat repelled by this frank admission of deceit. “I always tell my mother everything, why I could not sleep at night if I thought I had deceived her.”
“Everything is fair in love and war, that’s what my governess used to say, but she was a horrid thing,” the princess confessed candidly; “I just hated her. She had a beau and I used to steal his letters and pretend I had read them, just for the fun of seeing her get in a rage. But go on, and tell me more about those girls.”
The last word had barely left her lips when a shriek, shrill and terrifying, rang through the room. Nathalie jumped up in a spasm of terror, but before she could ascertain what it was, another one, even shriller and more prolonged than the first one, as it seemed to the frightened girl, sounded right in her very ear. Her heart leaped to her throat, a stifled cry escaped her as she dropped back in her chair cowering with fear. Then came another cry, followed by weird, demoniacal laughter. Nathalie put her hands up to her face determined to tear off her bandage, for that blood-curdling shriek, that hideous laugh, she had heard before—and then she remembered—oh, she was in the house of the Mystic!
CHAPTER XII—THE WILD FLOWER HIKE
“Oh, it’s the crazy man!” came with a flash into Nathalie’s mind. What should she do? If she could only take off that horrible bandage from her eyes!
“Oh, don’t be frightened!” exclaimed the princess with a merry laugh as she saw her companion cower in her chair. “It’s only Jimmie! Jimmie, stop that racket!” she continued with a loud clap of her hands. But Jimmie, whoever he was, only replied with another agonizing shriek. This time the princess called angrily, “Mamma, come and make Jimmie stop his shrieking. Miss Page is awfully frightened!”
Nathalie, as she heard the foregoing explanation, and realized that it was not an insane person screaming, gave a hysterical gasp and turned her head in the direction of the shrieks, but alas! her blinders, like a black wall, barred her vision.