"I wonder, though," she added, "you are not frozen like—like a pebble, sitting there."
"But I am," I said, laughing softly. "It doesn't matter in me, because I'm so easy to thaw. You ought to know that. Oh, Miss Bowater, think if this were summer time and the dew and the first burning heat! Are you wrapped up? And shall we sit here, just—just for one dance of the Sisters: thou lost dove, Merope?"
For there on high—and I had murmured the last words all but inaudibly to myself—there played the spangling Pleiads, clear above her head in the twig-swept sky.
"What sisters?" she inquired, merely humouring me, perhaps.
"The Six, Fanny, look! You cannot see their Seventh—yet she is all that that is about." South to north I swept my hand across the powdery firmament. "And I myself trudge along down Watling Street; that's the Milky Way. I don't think, Fanny, I shall ever, ever be weaned. Please, may I call you that?"
She frowned up a moment into the emptiness, hesitated, then—just like a white peacock I had once seen when a child from my godmother's ancient carriage as we rolled by an old low house with terraces smooth as velvet beneath its cedars—she disposed her black draperies upon the ground at a little distance, disclosing, in so doing, beneath their folds the moon-blanched flounces of her party gown. I gazed spellbound. I looked at the white and black, and thought of what there was within their folds, and of the heart within that, and of the spirit of man. Such was my foolish fashion, following idly like a butterfly the scents of the air, flitting on from thought to thought, and so missing the full richness of the one blossom on which I might have hovered.
"Tell me some more," broke suddenly the curious voice into the midst of this reverie.
"Well, there," I cried, "is fickle Algol; the Demon. And over there where the Crab crawls, is the little Beehive between the Roses."
"Præsepe," drawled Fanny.
"Yes," said I, unabashed, "the Beehive. And crane back your neck, Fanny—there's little Jack-by-the-Middle-Horse; and far down, oh, far down, Berenice's Hair, which would have been Fanny Bowater's Hair, if you had been she."