No answers came to her, but deep in her soul was the conviction that Jeanne was in for one more novel adventure, and the sort of adventure she loved, at that.
Still, she had not guessed the half of it.
CHAPTER VII
THE PLACE OF DARKNESS
Florence never tired of her work on the Enchanted Island. On this island which man by his ingenuity and tireless energy had drawn from the very bottom of the lake, children romped while their elders sought amusement to their own liking.
Florence loved small children. With their gay frocks, their tossing hair, their frank smiles, she found them entrancing. Just to watch over them as they rode on gay launches or diminutive motor buses, or laughed at the talking cow and the puppet show; to climb with them the magic mountain where all manner of strange people from fairyland awaited them; then to call all this work and to receive money for it on pay day—this to her seemed absurd.
And yet this was her manner of spending her day on the Enchanted Island. So absorbed in it did she become that she all but forgot to call Jeanne and tell her of the strange appointment she had made for eleven o’clock that night.
At four she did think of it, and at once dashed to the telephone.
“Oh, Jeanne!” she exclaimed, as a voice came to her over the wire. “Are you there? I’ve got exciting news. We are to meet a movie queen at the Rutledge Tavern to-night—eleven o’clock. You’ll be there?”
“Of a certainty!” Jeanne’s tone was eager. “But why?”
“I can’t tell you.”