A sweetbriar, herself, now, the unfinished protest a thorn in her brain, she was over the low wall—and through the dim shadow gate of the wood.
A pure, high note upon the air, a shrill, vibrating beat, as of a bird or a woodsman faintly calling! Wordlessly calling!
But it was not bird, nor woodsman. Una stood still, near a dark little pond, fringed with blue iris—May iris. She heard the birds with it.
“Goodness! can it be-e—am I dreaming that I’m Pemrose—Pemrose, ‘listening in’ on something, picking up sounds from the air with a wonderful ring—radio ring—that her father has made for her?”
The girl looked down at her forefinger; there was no deep ring, no shining cat-whisker, no shimmering crystal there.
“Or am I—am I going far beyond her, beyond any one, picking up waves, sounds, without any of these things, aërial—or ‘radio soul’?”
The dark eyes were translucent now in the dimness of the wood, with the vision that she, least practical, least plodding of girls—except where her flowers were concerned—should be the elect of heaven for a new discovery.
And as the elect of heaven cannot pause to consider, on she went, through the heavy dew silvering the brown pine needles, sparkling upon tall fiddle-head brake and cinnamon fern, occasionally upon the ebony stem of a baby maidenhair upon a bank.
The woods were unspeakable at this hour—the slowly lighting May woods. There was a little, stealing smile in them, a laugh too young, too subtle to belong to this old world, at all. Or else the world had suddenly grown very young—so young that anything might happen!
Una, herself, felt more like six than sixteen, within a near run of sixteen, as she tiptoed over the trail of a sunbeam on the needles, pausing now and again to lift one foot off the ground, lift it high and listen—after the manner of the terrier who thinks that he cannot listen satisfactorily without a paw in the air.
The high-pitched note, the elfin call vibrated off into faintness. And now, again, she seemed to be standing in mists by a seashore, holding a hollow shell, with a curve in its pipe, to her ear.
There was a throbbing of the air about her, a low reverberation, swelling into a soft intoning, like the murmur of sad sea waves.