Almost as airy and flute-like, though not as liquidly sweet and soaring, were bird-notes which answered back from within the very halo of Pemrose herself; and she turned, with her heart in her throat, to see who--who had the thrush in her pocket.
Surely, it was the sweetest grace ever said.
A duet between a hermit thrush and a Camp Fire Girl! Pinnacle vespers!
If gladness did not flow freely now, then human hearts were a desert!
Instead, they were enchanted ground, those girlish hearts, carried away by a sense that Mother Earth did not, after all, have to go outside her own atmosphere for her fairy-land,--her golden crown of romance.
preluded again the little brown hermit-lover, with the rufous tail and ruffled, speckled breast, from an evergreen twig of the low pine-scrub.
And, once more, the aping response, the counterfeit thrush-note, came from some little branch of that goodly green tree known as the White Birch Group.
"Who's doing it? Oh-h! who's doing it--answering?" breathed Pemrose Lorry, feeling thrown into the shade with her Thunder Bird; which wasn't altogether bad for her, either. "Oh! it's _you_, is it? Where's the whistle--the bird-caller's whistle?"
"Here. Look!" A maiden shy as a hermit-thrush herself, with rufous lights in her sleek brown hair, and tiny, red-brown specks flecking the iris of her eyes--corresponding to the many freckles upon her small face, with a luminous quality added--opened a volunteering palm.
In its concave hollow, also marbled with sun-spots, lay the magic whistle, the two gleaming tin disks about the size of a fifty-cent piece, joined one upon another with an eighth of an inch distance between them, through whose simple medium the music in the heart of a fourteen-year-old girl had so attuned itself to a little of the melody in the breast of the thrush as to draw--actually draw--the hermit himself forth on to a rock on the edge of the thicket, looking eagerly, a trifle doubtfully, for the raw singer--the mate, who had answered him.
"Romeo and Juliet!" laughed the Guardian. "Such a dear little feathered Romeo, with a beak lined with pure gold--and a fairy oboe in his breast! Juliet--" she lightly touched the brown-plumaged maiden--"Juliet answering from her balcony, this mound!"