Page:Anderson--Isle of seven moons.djvu/37

Rh and signed him to a place beside her on the rustic seat under the apple-tree. He would have taken it anyway.

Her caller promptly and characteristically resented her inattention to His Princeship, and particularly to that new straw and its bright fraternity band.

"Welcome to our city!" he jeered sarcastically, twirling the ribbon into a rainbow gyroscope, then,—"What's that you're doing, there?"

Absent-mindedly she withdrew her foot from the bare patch between the ridged roots and surveyed the hieroglyphics she had been tracing. There, they were,—seven little cones in seven circles. Funny, wasn't it? All night long she had been pursuing them—or they her—entrancing, beautiful, and always beckoning. Through her dreams the lovely shining things had floated on the giant sea-saucer. Sometimes they formed strange fantastic figures, and once they had even fallen in line and like children "snapped the whip." And in the moment that always comes between complete unconsciousness and half-awaking, they had dropped quite over the edge of the sea-saucer, vanishing into a golden void. And she had knelt on the edge, looking over to see what could be underneath—and was disappointed because she could not see.

But "Nothing," was all she answered Phil.

Then, for just at this unpropitious moment Ben must come up the street, she looked at her father, all curves and parabola outlines like some recumbent hippo of Lewis Carroll's fancy. The audible assurance that he was asleep was really so overpowering that a quaint conceit of her