Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/212

 David, still in the damp, bedraggled clothes of last night's adventures, but whistling gayly and handling wrench and hammer as though life itself depended on his speed. He looked at her over his shoulder, smiling his widest and happiest smile.

"Don't go," he said, breathless and eager, "don't go. Something—something is just going to happen!"

There was the snapping of a switch and the slow creak of a lever that had not recently been moved. Then followed a faint and rising hum, a whir of wheels grew louder and deeper, that filled the death-like silence of the room with gay song, that sounded over the garden and through the house, that reached the ears of the invalid upstairs and made him stir and smile and open his eyes.

Betsey listened enthralled, too filled with breathless delight to heed any other sound. Yet the gate from the lane was flung hastily and noisily open and a man in uniform came striding up the path. She did not even heed when Dick, with joyous cawing, spread wide black wings to fly to the stranger's shoulder, she only looked up, startled, to see him standing in the inner hallway beyond the workshop door. There was something of Miss Miranda in his bearing, something of her spirit in his dancing eyes. And his voice, somehow, had a faint ring of her father's when he called up the stair, the same