Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/54

 She liked him, and she knew it. On her way out with Conroy she had been wondering whether she would like him. She was glad that she did.

As for Don, he had no feminine introspection, and his happiness held him in a dazed silence. He was conscious only that a young divinity—for she was already more than a girl to him—had come glowing and beautiful out of dreamland, and sat beside him in an odour of violets, and talked to him with a musical, soft voice.

"The water sounds so pretty," she said.

He replied musingly: "I'd change it for you if it didn't."

"Why? How?"

"It's the stream running over some big stones. You can change the sound—by changing the stones."

"Really?"

"Would you like to?"

"Why, of course!"

The tiny waterfall was just below their knoll, at the end of a bright shallow where three boulders held back the bed of the stream and dropped the current brawling over their shoulders into a dark pool. Don helped her down the steep bank to the water's edge; and with much excitement and more laughter, with little cries of delight from her and a furious barking from Dexter, they loosened stones from the bank and put them where the plangent water would strike and curl about them; and with every stone, sure enough, they got a new note.

Then they followed down the changes of the stream