"Put it down there on the hard sand," Ralph said, "where they can't fail to see it."

"Hold!" exclaimed Honey in a tone of burlesque warning. "There must be five mirrors. He knows nothing of women who thinks that one mirror may be divided among five girls. I hope Lulu cops this one."

His companions did not laugh. Apparently they were impressed with the sapience of his remark. They searched the trunks until they had gathered the five that Honey demanded. They placed them in a row just above the high-water line. The mirrors caught the sunlight, reflected it.

"They won't do a thing to those girls," said Honey. There was the glee in his voice of a little boy who is playing a practical joke.

The girls came in a group in the middle of the afternoon.

"They've spotted them already," said Honey.

"Trust a woman and a looking-glass."

The discovery ruined discipline; it broke ranks; the five girls flew high, flew low, flew separated, flew grouped, crowded about Julia, obviously asking her advice. Obviously she gave it; for following her quick, clear tones of advice came a confused chattering—remonstrance. Then Peachy, Clara, Chiquita, and Lulu dropped a little. Julia alone came no nearer. She alone showed no excitement.

The men meantime watched. They could not, as they had so loftily resolved, pretend to ignore the situation. But they kept silent and still. Once or twice the girls glanced curiously in their direction. But in the main they ignored them. Descending in big, slow, cautious, sliding curves, they circled nearer and nearer the sand.

Suddenly Lulu screamed. Still screaming, she bounded—it was almost that she bounced—straight up. The others streamed to the zenith in the wake of her panic, caught up, closed about her. There floated down the shrillness of agitated question and answer.

"What the Hades—" Ralph said in a mystified tone.

"I've got it," said Honey. "She caught a look at herself in one of the mirrors and she's scared. Don't be afraid, Lulu," he called in a reassuring tone; "it won't hurt you."

Lulu evidently got what he intended to convey. Again she sank slowly, hovered an instant close to the sand, brought her face near to a mirror, bounced up, dipped down, brought her face nearer, fluttered, put out one hand, withdrew it, put out the other, withdrew it, put out both, seized a mirror firmly, darted to the zenith.

"Well, what do you know about that!" said Billy. And, "Oh, the angels!" exclaimed Pete. Ralph's face opened in the fatuous grin which always meant satisfaction with him. Honey turned somersaults of delight. Even Frank twinkled.

For, high up in the heaven, five heads positively bumped over the meager oval of silver.

Lulu finally pulled out of the crowd and flew away. But all the time she held the mirror straight before her, clasped tightly in two hands, ecstatically "eating herself up" as Honey described it.

The men continued to watch.

Gradually, one after another, the other four girls fell under the lure of their vanity and their acquisitiveness.

Clara dove first, clutched a long-handled oval of yellow celluloid. Next Chiquita swam lazily downward, made a brief scarlet flutter on the beach, seized an elaborate double mirror set in gilded wood. Peachy followed; she chose a heart-shaped glass, ebony-framed. Last of all, Julia came floating slowly down. She took the only one that was left: it was, of course, the smallest; it was framed in carved ivory.

For the next ten minutes, the sky presented a picture of five winged women, stationed at various points of the compass, ecstatically studying their own beautiful faces in mirrors held in their white, strong-looking hands.

Then, flying together again, they discovered that the mirrors reflected. At first, this created panic, then amusement. Ensued a delicious girl-frolic. Darting through the air, laughing, jabbering, they played tag, throwing the light into each other's eyes. A little later Peachy gathered them into a bunch and whispered instructions. Immediately they began flashing the mirrors into the men's faces. To escape this bombardment, their victims had finally to throw themselves face downward on the sand.

In the midst of this excitement came disaster.

Lulu dropped her mirror.

It hit square and shattered on the sand to many brilliant splinters. Lulu fell like a stone, seized the empty frame, gazed into it for a heart-broken second, burst into tears.

It was the first time that the men as a group had ever seen in the flying-girls an exhibition of this feminine faculty. For a moment, they watched her, deeply interested, as though confronted by an unfamiliar phenomenon. Then Billy wriggled.

"Say, stop her, somebody," he begged, "I hate to hear a woman cry."

"So do I," said Peter, his face twisted into creases of discomfort. "She's your girl, Honey. Stop her, for God's sake."

"How's he going to stop her, I'd like to know?" demanded Ralph. "We don't converse very fluently yet, you know."

"Well, I know how to stop her," said Honey, leaping up. "I say, Lulu," he called. "Stop that crying, that's a good girl. It makes us all sick. I'll find you another mirror in a moment."

Lulu did not stop crying. Perhaps she was not too primitive to realize that tears are the argument a woman negotiates best. She wailed and wept assiduously.

Honey, in the meantime, flew to the trunks. He dumped one after another; clothes flew from either energetic hand like gravel from a shovel. Suddenly he gave a yell of triumph and brandished—. It was cheap and brass-bound, but it reflected the sunlight as well as though it had been framed in massy gold.

"Here you are, Lulu!" he called. He ran down the beach and held it up to her. Lulu caught the reflection. She dropped sheer. In her eagerness, she took it from Honey's very hand. And as she seized it, a tear dropped on his upturned cheek. And as the tear dropped, her face broke into smiles.

"Well," exclaimed Ralph an instant later, "if I'd had any idea that they were angels and not females, this would settle the question for me. Good Lord! Well, you have got a temper, my lady."

It was of Julia he spoke.

For, descending slowly and deliberately, Julia hovered an instant above a big rock. Then, with a tremendous slashing impulse of a powerful arm, she hurled her mirror on it. She flew in a very frenzy of haste into the west.

The girls returned the next morning early.

"After the graft," Ralph commented cynically.

Honey had been rifling the trunks again. He walked down to the beach with an armful of fans, piled them there, returned to camp. The girls descended, eyed them, ascended, gathered together, talked, descended, ascended again.

"What's the row?" Billy asked.

"They don't know what they're for," said Pete. He ran down on to the beach, seized a fan of feathers, opened it, and stood fanning himself. Then he put it down and ran back.

He had hardly returned to the group of men when Chiquita swooped down and seized the fan that he had dropped. The feathers were the exact scarlet of her wings. She floated about, fanning herself slowly, her teeth flashing white in her dusky face.

"By jiminy, if she only had a mantilla, she'd be a Spanish angel," Billy commented whimsically.

The other girls dropped down after a while and seized a fan, or in Clara's case two, and Peachy's three. They sailed off into the west, fanning themselves slowly.

"Say, we've got to have our ammunition all ready the next time they come," said Ralph. "I bet they're here this afternoon. They've never had any of these lover-like little attentions, apparently. And they're falling for them so quick that it's fairly embarrassing. Pete, you'll have to be muckraking this island before we get through."

In their search for what Honey called "bait," they came across a trunk filled with scarfs of various descriptions; gauze, satin, chiffon; embroidered, sequined, fringed; every color, fabric, and decoration; every shape and size. "Drummers' samples!" Honey commented.

"I tell you what we'll do now," Ralph suggested. "Put the first five scarfs on the beach where they can get them. But if they want any more, make them take them from our hands. Be careful, though, not to frighten them. One move in their direction and we'll undo everything we've accomplished."

As Ralph prophesied, the girls came again that day, but they waited until after sunset. It was full-moon night, however; the island was as white as day. They must have seen the gay-colored heaps from a distance; they pounced on them at once. The air resounded with cooings of delight. There was no doubt of it; the scarfs pleased them almost as much as the mirrors. Before the first flush of their delight had passed, Honey ran down the beach, bearing aloft a long, shimmering, white streamer. Ralph followed with a scarf of black and gold. Billy, Pete, and Frank joined them, each fluttering a brilliant silk gonfalon.

The girls drew away in alarm at first. Then they drew together for counsel. All the time the men stood quiet, waving their delicately hued spoils. One by one—Clara first, then Chiquita, Lulu, Peachy, Julia—they succumbed; they sank slowly. Even then they floated for a long while, visibly swinging between the desire for possession and the instinct of caution. But in the end each one of them took from her mate the scarf he held up to her. Followed the prettiest exhibition of flying that Angel Island had yet seen. The girls fastened the long gauzes to their heads and shoulders. They flicked and flitted and flittered, they danced and pirouetted and spun through the air, trailing what in the aqueous moonlight looked like mist, irradiated, star-sown.

"Well," said Ralph that night after the girls had vanished, "I don't see that this business of handing out loot is getting us anywhere. We can keep this up until we've given those harpies every blessed thing in the trunks. Then where are we? They'll have everything we have to give, and we'll be no nearer acquainted. We've got to do something else."

"If we could only get them down to earth—if we could only accustom them to walking about," Honey declared, "I'm sure we could rig up some kind of trap."

"But you can't get them to do that," Billy said. "And the answer's obvious. They can't walk. You see how tiny, and useless-looking their feet are. They're no good to them, because they've never used them. It never occurs to them apparently even to try to walk."

"Well, who would walk if he could fly?" demanded Pete pugnaciously.

"Well said, son," agreed Ralph, "but what are we going to do about it?"

"I'll tell you what we can do about it," said Frank quietly, "if you'll listen to me." The others turned to him. Their faces expressed varying emotions—surprise, doubt, incredulity, a great deal of amusement. But they waited courteously.

"The trouble has been heretofore," Frank went on in his best academic manner, "that you've gone at this problem in too obvious a way. You've appealed to only one motive—acquisitiveness. There's a stronger one than that—curiosity."

The look of politely veiled amusement on the four faces began to give way to credulity. "But how, Frank?" asked Billy.

"I'll show you how," said Frank. "I've been thinking it out by myself for over a week now."

There was an air of quiet certainty about Frank. His companions looked furtively at each other. The credulity in their faces changed to interest. "Go on, Frank," Billy said. They listened closely to his disquisition.

"What ever gave you the idea, Frank?" Billy asked at the end.

"The fact that I found a Yale spring-lock the other day," Frank answered quietly.

The next morning, the men arose at sunrise and went at once to work. They worked together on the big cabin—the Clubhouse—and they dug and hammered without intermission all day long. Halfway through the morning, the girls came flying in a group to the beach. The men paid no attention to them. Many times their visitors flew up and down the length of the crescent of white, sparkling sand, each time dropping lower, obviously examining it for loot. Finding none, they flew in a body over the roof of the Clubhouse, each face turned disdainfully away. The men took no notice even of this. The girls gathered together in a quiet group and obviously discussed the situation. After a little parley, they flew off. Later in the afternoon came Lulu alone. She hovered at Honey's shoulder, displaying all her little tricks of graceful flying; but Honey was obdurate. Apparently he did not see her. Came Chiquita, floating lazily back and forth over Frank's head like a monstrous, deeply colored tropical bloom borne toward him on a breeze. She swam down close, floated softly, but Frank did not even look in her direction. Came Peachy with such marvels of flying, such diving and soaring, such gyrating and flashing, that it took superhuman self-control not to drop everything and stare. But nobody looked or paused. Came Clara, posturing almost at their elbows. Came all save Julia, but the men ignored them equally.

"Gee," said Honey, after they had all disappeared, "that took the last drop of resolution in me. By Jove, you don't suppose they'll get sore and stay away for good?"

Frank shook his head.

Day by day the men worked on the Clubhouse; they worked their hardest from the moment of sunrise to the instant of sunset. It was a square building, big compared with the little cabins. They made a wide, heavy door at one end and long windows with shutters on both sides. These were kept closed.

"Only one more day's work," Frank said at the end of a fortnight, "and then—."

They finished the Clubhouse, as he prophesied, the next day.

"Now to furnish it," Frank said.

They put up rough shelves and dressing-tables. They put in chairs and hammocks. Then, working secretly at night when the moon was full, or in the morning just after sunrise—at any time during the day when the girls were not in sight—they transferred the contents of a half a dozen women's trunks to the Clubhouse. They hung the clothes conspicuously in sight; they piled many small toilet articles on tables and shelves; they placed dozens of mirrors about.

"It looks like a sale at the Waldorf," Honey said as they stood surveying the effect. "Tomorrow, we begin our psychological siege. Is that right, Frank?"

"Psychological siege is right," answered Frank with an unaccustomed gayety and an unaccustomed touch of slang.

In the meantime the girls had shown their pique at this treatment in a variety of small ways. Peachy and Clara made long detours around the island in the effort not to pass near the camp. Chiquita and Lulu flew overhead, but only in order to throw pebbles and sand down on the men while they were working.

Julia alone took no part in this feud. If she was visible at all, it was only as a glittering speck in the far-off reaches of the blue sky.

The next time the four girls approached the island, the men arose immediately from their work. With an ostentatious carelessness, they went into the Clubhouse. With an ostentatious carefulness, they closed the door. They stayed there for three hours.

Outside, the girls watched this maneuver in visible astonishment. They drew together and talked it over, flew down close to the Clubhouse, flew about it in circles, examined it on every side, made even one perilous trip across the roof, the tips of their feet tapping it in vicious little dabs. But flutter as they would, jabber as they would, the Clubhouse preserved a tomb-like silence. After a while they banged on the shutters and knocked against the door; but not a sound or movement manifested itself inside.

They flew away finally.

The next day the same thing happened—and the next—and the next.

But on the fourth day, something quite different occurred.

The instant the men saw the girls approaching, they carefully closed the door and windows of the Clubhouse, and then marched into the interior of the island. Close by the lake, there was a thick jungle of trees—a place where the branches matted together, in a roof-like structure, leaving a cleared space below. The men crawled into this shelter on their hands and knees for an eighth of a mile. They stayed there three hours.

The girls had followed this procession in an air-course that exactly paralleled the trail. When the men disappeared under the trees, they came together in a chattering group, obviously astonished, obviously irritated. Hours went by. Not a thing stirred in the jungle; not a sound came from it. The girls hovered and floated, dipped, dove, flew along the edge of the lake close to the water, tried by looking under the trees, to get what was going on. It was useless. Then they alighted on the tree-tops and swung themselves down from branch to branch until they were as near earth as they dared to come. Again they peered and peeped. And again it was useless. In the end, flying and floating with the disconsolate air of those who kill time, they frankly waited until the men emerged from the jungle. Then, again the girls took up the airy course that paralleled the trail to the camp.

For two weeks the men rigidly followed a program. Alternately they shut themselves inside the Clubhouse and concealed themselves in the forest. They stayed the same length of time in both places—never less than three hours.

For two weeks, the girls rigidly followed a program. When the men retired to the Clubhouse, they spent the three hours hovering over it, sometimes banging viciously with feet and hands against the walls, sometimes dropping stones on the roof. When the men retired to the jungle, they spent the three hours beating about the branches of the trees, dipping lower and lower into the underbrush, taking, as time went on, greater and greater risks. But, as in both cases, the men were screened from observation, all their efforts were useless.

Finally came a day with a difference. The men retired to the forest as usual but, by an apparent inadvertence, they left the door of the Clubhouse open a crack.

As usual the girls followed the men to the lake, but this time there was a different air about them; they seemed to bubble with excitement. The men crawled under the underbrush and waited. The girls made a perfunctory search of the jungle and then, as at a concerted signal, they darted like bolts of lightning back in the direction of the camp.

"I think we've got them, boys," said Frank. There was a kind of Berserker excitement about him, a wild note of triumph in his voice and a white flare of triumph in his face. His breath came in excited gusts and his nostrils dilated under the strain.

"I'm sure of it," agreed Ralph. "And, by Jove, I'm glad. I've never had anything so get on my nerves as this chase." Ralph did, indeed, look worn. Haggard and wild-eyed, he was shaking under the strain.

"Lord, I'm glad—but, Lord, it's some responsibility," said Honey Smith. Honey was not white or drawn. He did not shake. But he had changed. Still radiantly youthful, there was a new look in his face—resolution.

"I feel like a mucker," groaned Billy. He lay face down on a heap of vines, his forehead pressed against the cool leaves. "But it is right," he added as one arguing fiercely with himself. "It is right. There's no other way."

"I feel like a white slaver," said Pete. He was unshaven and the black shadow of his beard contrasted sharply with the white set look in his face. "It's hell to live, isn't it? But the worst of it is, we must live."

"Time's up." Frank breathed these words on the long gust of his outgoing breath. "Now, don't go to pieces. Remember, it must be done."

One behind the other, they crawled through the narrow tunnel that they had cut into the underbrush—found the trail.

"Let's swim across the lake," Honey suggested; "I'm losing my nerve."

"Good idea," Billy said. They plunged into the water. Fifteen minutes later, they emerged on the other side, cool, composed, ready for anything.

The long trip back to the camp was taken almost in silence. Once in a while, a mechanical "That's a new bird, isn't it?" came from Billy and, a perfunctory "Look at that color," from Pete. Frank walked ahead. He towered above the others. He kept his eyes to the front. Ralph followed. At intervals, he pulled himself up and peered into the sky or dropped and tried to pierce the untranslatable distance; all this with the quiet, furtive, prowling movements of some predatory beast. Next came Honey, whistling under his breath and all the time whistling the same tune. Billy and Pete, walking side by side, tailed the procession. At times, those two caught themselves at the beginning of shuddering fits, but always by a supreme effort they managed to calm themselves.

They came finally to the point where the jungle-trail joined the sand-trail.

"There isn't one in sight," said Frank.

"They may have flown home," Honey said doubtfully.

"They're in the Clubhouse," said Ralph. And he burst suddenly into a long, wild cry of triumph. The cry was taken up in a faint shrill echo. From the distance came shrieks—women's voices—smothered.

"By God, we've got them," said Frank again.

And then a strange thing happened. Pete Murphy crooked his elbow up to his face and burst into hysterical weeping.

All this time, the men were moving swiftly towards the Clubhouse. As they approached, the sound inside grew in volume from a hum of terrified whisperings accented by drumming wings, to a pandemonium of cries and sobs and wails.

"They'll make a rush when we open the door, remember," Ralph reminded them. His eyes gleamed like a cat's.

"Yes, but we can handle them," said Frank. "There isn't much nerve left in them by this time."

"I say, boys, I can't stand this," burst out Billy. "Open the door and let them out."

Billy's words brought murmured echoes of approval from Pete and Honey.

"You've got to stand it," Frank said in a tone of command. He surveyed his mutinous crew with a stern look of authority.

"I can't do it," Honey admitted.

"I feel sick," Pete groaned.

Just then emerged from the pandemonium within another sound, curt and sharp-cut, the crash against the door of something heavy.

"That door won't stand much of that," Frank warned. "They'll get out before we know it."

The look of irresolution went like a flash from Billy's face, from Honey's, from Pete's. The look of the hunter took its place, keen, alert, determined, cruel.

"Keep close behind me," Frank ordered.

"When I open the door, push in as quick as you can. They'll try to rush out."

Inside the vibrant drumming kept up. Mixed with it came screams more sharp with terror. There came another crash.

Frank pounded on the door. "Stand back!" he called in a quiet tone of authority as if the girls could understand. He fitted the key to the lock, turned it, pulled the door open, leaped over the two broken chairs on the threshold. The others followed, crowding close.

The rush that they had expected did not come.

Apparently at the first touch on the door, the girls had retreated to the farthest corner. They stood huddled there, gathered behind Julia. They stood close together, swaying, half-supporting each other, their pinions drooped and trailing, their eyes staring black with horror out of their white faces.

Julia, a little in front, stood at defiance. Her wings, as though animated by a gentle voltage of electricity, kept lifting with a low purring whirr. Half-way they struck the ceiling and dropped dead. The tiny silvery-white feathers near her shoulders rose like fur on a cat's back. One hand was clenched; the other grasped a chair. Her face was not terrified; neither was it white. It glowed with rage, as if a fire had been built in an alabaster vase.

All about on the floor, on chairs, over shelves lay the gauds that had lured them to their capture. Of them all, Julia alone showed no change. Below the scarlet draperies swathing Chiquita's voluptuous outlines appeared the gold stockings and the high-heeled gold slippers which she had tried on her beautiful Andalusian feet. Necklaces swung from her throat; bracelets covered her arms; rings crowded her fingers. Lulu had thrown about her leafy costume an evening cape of brilliant blue brocade trimmed with ermine. On her head glittered a boudoir-cap of web lace studded with iridescent mock jewels. Over her mail of seaweed, Clara wore a mandarin's coat—yellow, with a decoration of tiny mirrors. Her hair was studded with jeweled hairpins, combs; a jeweled band, a jeweled aigrette. Peachy had put on a pink chiffon evening gown hobbled in the skirt, one shoulder-length, shining black glove, a long chain of fire-opals. Out of this emerged with an astonishing effect of contrast her gleaming pearly shoulders and her, lustrous blue wings.

An instant the two armies stood staring at each other—at close terms for the first time. Then, with one tremendous sweep of her arm, Julia threw something over their heads out the open door. It flashed through the sunlight like a rainbow rocket, tore the surface of the sea in a dazzle of sparks and colors.

"There goes five hundred thousand dollars," said Honey as the Wilmington "Blue" found its last resting-place. "Shut the door, Pete."

With another tremendous sweep of her magnificent arm, Julia lifted the chair, swung it about her head as if it were a whip, rushed—not running or flying, but with a movement that was both—upon the five men. Her companions seized anything that was near. Lulu wrenched a shelf from its fastenings.

The men closed in upon them.

Twenty minutes later, silence had fallen on the Clubhouse, a silence that was broken only by panted breathing. The five men stood resting. The five girls stood, tied to the walls, their hands pinioned in front of them. At intervals, one or the other of them would call in an agonized tone to Julia. And always she answered with words that reassured and calmed.

The room looked as if it had housed a cyclone. The furniture lay in splinters; the feminine loot lay on the floor, trampled and torn.

"I'd like to sit down," Ralph admitted. It was the first remark that any one of the men had made. "Lucky they can't understand me. I'd hate them to know it, but I'm as weak as a cat."

"No sitting down, yet," Frank commanded, still in his inflexible tones of a disciplinarian. "Open the door, Pete—get some air in here!" He knelt before a sea-chest which filled one corner of the room, unlocked it, lifted the cover. The sunlight glittered on the contents.

"My God, I can't," said Billy.

"I feel like a murderer," said Pete.

"You've got to," Frank said in a tone, growing more peremptory with each word. "Now."

"That's right," said Ralph. "If we don't do it now, we'll never do it."

Frank handed each man a pair of shears.

"I sharpened them myself," he said briefly.

Heads over their shoulders, the girls watched.

Did intuition shout a warning to them? As with one accord, a long wail arose from them, swelled to despairing volume, ascended to desperate heights.

"Now!" Frank ordered.

They had thought the girls securely tied.

Clara fought like a leopardess, scratching and biting.

Lulu struggled like a caged eagle, hysteria mounting in her all the time until the room was filled with her moans.

Peachy beat herself against the wall like a maniac. She shrieked without cessation. One scream stopped suddenly in the middle—Ralph had struck her on the forehead. For the rest of the shearing session she lay over a chair, limp and silent.

Chiquita, curiously enough, resisted not at all. She only swayed and shrugged, a look of a strange cunning in her long, deep, thick-lashed eyes. But of them all, she was the only one who attempted to comfort; she talked incessantly.

Julia did not move or speak. But at the first touch of the cold steel on her bare shoulders, she fainted in Billy's arms.

An hour later the men emerged from the Clubhouse.

"I'm all in," Honey muttered. "And I don't care who knows it. I'm going for a swim." Head down, he staggered away from the group and zigzagged over the beach.

"I guess I'll go back to the camp for a smoke," Frank said. "I never realized before that I had nerves." Frank was white, and he shook at intervals. But some strange spirit, compounded equally of a sense of victory and of defeat, flashed in his eyes.

"I'm going off for a tramp." Pete was sunken as well as ashen; he looked dead. "Do you suppose they'll hurt themselves pulling against those ropes?" he asked tonelessly.

"Let them struggle for a while," Ralph advised. Like the rest of them, Ralph was exhausted-looking and pale. But at intervals he swaggered and glowed. With his strange, new air of triumph and his white teeth glittering through his dark mustache, he was more than ever like some huge predatory cat. "Serves them right! They've taken it out of us for three months."

Billy did not speak, but he swayed as he followed Frank. He fell on his bed when they reached the camp. He lay there all night motionless, staring at the ceiling.

There was a tiny spot of blood on one hand.



V

A.

Dawn on Angel Island.

A gigantic rose bloomed at the horizon-line; half its satin petals lay on the iron sea, half on the granite sky. The gold-green morning star was fading slowly. From the island came a confusion of bird-calls.

Addington emerged from the Clubhouse. Without looking about him, he staggered down the path to the Camp. The fire was still burning. The other men lay beside it, moveless, asleep with their clothes on. They waked as his footsteps drew near. Livid with fatigue, their eyelids dropping in spite of their efforts, they jerked upright.

"How are they?" Billy asked.

"The turn has come," Ralph answered briefly. As he spoke he crumpled slowly into a heap beside the fire. "They're going to live."

The others did not speak; they waited.

"Julia did it. She had dozed off. Suddenly in the middle of the night, she sat upright. She was as white as marble but there was a light back of her face. And with all that wonderful hair falling down—she looked like an angel. She called to them one by one. And they answered her, one by one. You never heard—it was like little birds answering the mother-bird's call. At first their voices were faint and weak. But she kept encouraging them until they sat up—God, it was—."

Ralph could not go on for a while.

"She gave them a long talk—she was so weak she had to keep stopping—but she went right on—and they listened. Of course I couldn't understand a word. But I knew what she said. In effect, it was: 'We cannot die. We must all live. We cannot leave any one of us here alone. Promise me that you will get well!' She pledged them to it. She made them take an oath, one after the other. Oh, they were obedient enough. They took it."

He stopped again.

"That talk made the greatest difference. After it was all over, I gave them some water. They were different even then. They looked at me—and they didn't shrink or shudder. When I handed Julia the cup, she made herself smile. God, you never saw such a smile. I nearly—" he paused, "I all but went back to the cabin and cut my throat. But the fight's over. They'll get well. They're sleeping like children now."

"Thank God!" Merrill groaned. "Oh, thank God!"

"I've felt like a murderer ever since——" Billy said. He stopped and his voice leaped with a sudden querulousness. "You didn't wake me up; you've done double guard duty during the night, Ralph."

"Oh, that's all right. You were all in—I felt that—" Ralph stammered in a shamefaced fashion. "And I knew I could stand it."

"There's a long sleep coming to you, Ralph," Pete said. "You've hardly closed your eyes this week. No question but you've saved their lives."

B.

Mid-morning on Angel Island.

The sun had mounted half-way to the zenith; sky and sea and land glittered with its luster. Like war-horses, the waves came ramping over the smooth, shimmering sand; war-horses with bodies of jade and manes of silver.

Pete floated inshore on a huge comber, ran up the beach a little way and sat down. Billy followed.

"I've come out just to get the picture," Pete explained.

"Same here," said Billy.

For an instant, both men contemplated the scene with the narrowed, critical gaze of the artist.

The flying-girls were swimming; and swimming with the same grace and strength with which formerly they flew. And as if inevitably they must take on the quality of the element in which they mixed, they looked like mermaids now, just as formerly they had looked like birds. They carried heads and shoulders high out of the water. Webs of sea-spume glittered on the shining hair and on the white flesh. One behind the other, they swam in rhythmic unison. Regularly the long, round, strong-looking right arms reached out of the water, bowed forward, clutched at the wave, and pulled them on. Simultaneously, the left arms reached back, pushed against the wave, and shot them forward. Their feet beat the water to a lather.

They were headed down the beach, hugging the shore. Swim as hard as they could, Honey and Frank managed but to keep up with them. Ralph overtook them only in their brief resting-periods. Further inshore, carried ceaselessly a little forward and then a little back, Julia floated; floated with an unimaginable lightness and yet, somehow, conserved her aspect of a creature cut in marble.

"I have never seen anything so beautiful in any art, ancient or modern," Billy concluded. "When those strange draperies that they affect get wet, they look like the Elgin marbles."

"If we should take them to civilization," was Pete's answer, "the Elgin marbles would become a joke."

Billy spoke after a long silence. "It's been an experience that—if I were—oh, but what's the use? You can't describe it. The words haven't been invented yet. I don't mean the fact that we've discovered members of a lost species—the missing link between bird and man. I mean what's happened since the capture. It's left marks on me. I'll bear them until I die. If we abandoned this island—and them—and went back to the world, I could never be the same person. If I woke up and found it was a dream, I could never be the same person."

"I know," Pete said, "I know. I've changed, too. We all have. Old Frank is a god. And Honey's grown so that—. Even Ralph's a different man. Changed—God, I should say I had. It's not only given me a new hold on things I thought I'd lost-morality, ethics, religion even—but it's developed something I have no word for—the fourth dimension of religion, faith."

"It's their weakness, I think, and their dependence." Now it was less that Billy tried to translate Pete's thought and more that he endeavored to follow his own. "It puts it up to a man so. And their beauty and purity and innocence and simplicity—." Billy seemed to be ransacking his vocabulary for abstract nouns.

"And that sense you have," Pete broke in eagerly, "of molding a virgin mind. It gives you a feeling of responsibility that's fairly terrifying at times. But there's something else mixed up with it—the instinct of the artist. It's as though you were trying to paint a picture on human flesh. You know that you're going to produce beauty." Pete's face shone with the look of creative genius. "The production of beauty excuses any method, to my way of thinking." He spoke half to himself. "God knows," he added after a pause, "whatever I've done and been, I could never do or be again. Sometimes a man knows when he's reached the zenith of his spiritual development. I've reached mine. I think they're beginning to trust us," he added after another long interval, in which silently they contemplated the moving composition. Pete's tone had come back to its everyday accent.

"No question about it," Billy rejoined. "If I do say it as shouldn't, I think my scheme was the right one—never to separate any one of them from the others, never to seem to try to get them alone, and in everything to be as gentle and kind and considerate as we could."

"That look is still in their eyes," Pete said. He turned away from Billy and his face contracted. "It goes through me like a knife——. When that's gone——."

"It will go inevitably, Pete," Billy reassured him cheerfully. Suddenly his own voice lowered. "One queer thing I've noticed. I wonder if you're affected that way. I always feel as if they still had wings. What I mean is this. If I stand beside one of them with my eyes turned away I always get an impression that they're still there, towering above my head—ghosts of wings. Ever notice it?"

"Oh, Lord, yes!" Pete agreed. "Often. I hate it. But that will go, too. Here they come."

The bathers had turned; they were swimming up the beach. They passed Julia, who joined the procession, and turned toward the land. Stretched in a long line, they rode in on a big wave. Billy and Pete leaped forward. Assisted by the men, the girls tottered up the sand, gathered into a little group, talking among themselves. Their wet draperies clung to them in long, sweeping lines; but they dried with amazing quickness. The sun grew hotter and hotter. Their transient flash of animation died down; their conversation gradually stopped.

Chiquita settled herself flat on the sand, the sunlight pouring like a silver liquid into the blue-black masses of her hair, her narrow brows, her thick eyelashes. Presently she fell asleep. Clara leaned against a low ledge of rock and spread her coppery mane across its surface. It dried almost immediately; she divided it into plaits and coils and wove it into an elaborate structure. Her fingers seemed to strike sparks from it; it coruscated. Julia lay on her side, eyes downcast, tracing with one finger curious tangled patterns in the sand. Her hair blew out and covered her body as with a silken, honey-colored fabric; the lines of her figure were lost in its abundance. Peachy sat drooped over, her hand supporting her chin and her knees supporting her elbows, her eyes fixed on the horizon-line. Her hair dried, too, but she did not touch it. It flowed down her back and spread into a pool of gold on the sand. She might have been a mermaid cast up by that sea on which she gazed with such a tragic wistfulness—and forever cut off from it.

A little distance from the rest, Honey sat with Lulu. She was shaking the brown masses of her hair vigorously and Honey was helping her. He was evidently trying to teach her something because, over and over again, his lips moved to form two words, and over and over again, her red lips parted, mimicking them. Gradually, Lulu lost all interest in her hair. She let it drop. It floated like a furry mantle over her shoulders. Into her little brown, pointed face came a look of overpowering seriousness, of tremendous concentration. Occasionally Honey would stop to listen to her; but invariably her recital sent him into peals of laughter. Lulu did not laugh; she grew more and more serious, more and more concentrated.

The other men talked among themselves. Occasionally they addressed a remark to their captives. The flying-girls replied in hesitating flutters of speech, a little breathy yes or no whenever those monosyllables would serve, an occasional broken phrase. Superficially they seemed calm, placid even. But if one of the men moved suddenly, an uncontrollable panic overspread their faces.

Honey arose after a long interval, strolled over to the main group.

"I think they're coming to the conclusion that we're regular fellows," he declared cheerfully. "Lulu doesn't jump or shriek any more when I run toward her."

"Oh, it's coming along all right," Frank said.

"It's surprising how quickly and how correctly they're getting the language."

"I'm going to begin reading aloud to them next week," Pete announced. "That'll be a picnic."

"It's been a long fight," Ralph said contentedly. "But we've won out. We've got them going. I knew we would." His eyes went to Peachy's face, but once there, their look of triumph melted to tenderness.

"What are we going to read them?" Honey asked idly. He did not really listen to Pete's answer. His eyes, sparkling with amusement, had gone back to Lulu, who still sat seriously practising her lesson. Red lips, little white teeth, slender pink tongue seemed to get into an inextricable tangle over the simple monosyllables.

"Leave that to me!" Pete was saying mysteriously. "I'll have them reading and writing by the end of another two months."

"It's curious how long it's taken them to get over that terror of us," said Billy. "I cannot understand it."

"Oh, they'll explain why they've been so afraid," said Frank, "as soon as they've got enough vocabulary. We cannot know, until they tell us how many of their conventions we have broken, how brutal we may have seemed."

"And yet," Billy went on, "I should think they'd see that we wouldn't do anything that wasn't for their own good. Well, just as soon as I can put it over with them, I'm going to give them a long spiel on the gentleman's code. I don't believe they'll ever be frightened of us again. Hello!"

Lulu had tottered over to their group, supporting herself by the ledge of rock. She pulled herself upright, balancing precariously. She put her sharp little teeth close, parted her lips and produced:

"K-K-K-K-K-K-Kiss-S-S-S-S-S-S Me!"

The men burst into roars of laughter. Lulu looked from one face to the other in perplexity. In perplexity, the other women looked from her to them and at each other.

"Sounds like the Yale yell!" Pete commented.

"But what I can't understand," Billy said, reverting to his thesis, "is that they don't realize instantly that we wouldn't hurt them for any thing—that that's a thing a fellow couldn't do."

C.

Twilight on Angel Island.

The stars were beginning to shoot tiny white, five-pointed flames through the purple sky. The fireflies were beginning to cut long arcs of gold in the sooty dusk. The waves were coming up the low-tide beach with a long roar and retreating with a faint hiss. Afterwards floated on the air the music of the shingle, hundreds of pebbles pattering with liquid footsteps down the sand. Peals of laughter, the continuous bass roar of the men, an occasional uncertain soprano lilting of the women, came from the group. The girls were reciting their lessons.

"Three little girls from school are we, Pert as schoolgirls well can be, Filled to the brim with girlish glee, Three little maids from school!" intoned Lulu, Chiquita, and Clara together.

"Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? Silver bells and cockle shells, And pretty maids all in a row."

said Peachy.

"The hounds of spring are on winter's traces," began Julia. With no effort of the memory, with a faultless enunciation, a natural feeling for rhythm and apparently with comprehension, she, recited the Atalanta chorus.

"That's enough for lessons," Honey demanded.

"Wait a moment!"

He rushed into the bushes and busied himself among the fire-flies. The other four men, divining his purpose, joined him. They came back with handkerchiefs tied full of tiny, wriggling, fluttering green creatures.

In a few moments, the five women sat crowned with carcanets of living fire.

"Now read us a story," Lulu begged.

Pete drew a little book from his pocket. Discolored and swollen, the print was big and still black.

"'Once upon a time,'" he began, "'there was a little girl who lived with her father and her stepmother—'"

"What's 'stepmother'?" Lulu asked.

Pete explained.

"The stepmother had two daughters, and all three of these women were cruel and proud——'"

"What's 'cruel and proud'?" Chiquita asked.

Pete explained.

"'And so between the three the little girl had a very hard time. She worked like a slave all day long, and was never allowed to go out of the kitchen. The stepmother and the proud sisters, used to go to balls every night, leaving the little girl alone. Because she was always so dusty and grimy from working over the fire, they called her Cinderella. Now, it happened that the country was ruled by a very handsome young prince—'"

"What's 'handsome young prince'?" Clara asked.

Pete explained.

"'And all the ladies of the kingdom were in love with him.'"

"What's 'in love'?" Peachy asked.

Pete closed the book.

"Ah, that's a question," he said after an instant of meditation, "that will admit of some answer. Say, you fellers, you'd better come into this."

D.

Moonlight on Angel Island.

The sea lay like a carpet of silver stretched taut from the white line of the waves to the black seam of the sky. The land lay like a crumpled mass of silver velvet, heaped to tinselled brightness here, hollowed to velvety shadow there. Over both arched the mammoth silver tent of the sky. In the cleft in the rock on the southern reef sat Julia and Billy. Under a tree at the north sat Peachy and Ralph. Scattered in shaded places between sat the others. The night was quiet; but on the breeze came murmurs sometimes in the man's voice, sometimes in the woman's. Fragmentary they were, these murmurs, and inarticulate; but their composite was ever the same.

E.

Sunrise on Angel Island.

In and out among the trees, wound a procession following the northern trail. First came Lulu, white-clad, serious, pale, walking with Honey. The others, crowned with flowers and carrying garlands, followed, serious and silent, the women clinging with both hands to the men, who supported their snail-like, tottering progress with one arm about their waists. On the point of the northern reef, a cabin made of round beach-stones fronted the ocean. It fronted the rising sun now and a world, all ocean and sky, over which lay a rose dawnlight. Still silent, the procession paused and grouped about the house. Frank Merrill stepped forward and placed himself in front of Honey and Lulu.

"We are gathered here this morning," Frank said in his deep academic voice, "to marry this man to this woman and this woman to this man. If there is any reason why you should not enter into the married state, pause before it is too late." His voice came to a full stop. He waited. "If not, I pronounce you man and wife."

Silently still, the others placed their garlands and wreaths at the feet of the wedded pair. Turning, they walked slowly back over the trail.

F.

Midnight on Angel Island.

Julia sat alone on the stone bench at the door of the Honeymoon House. She gazed straight ahead out on a star-lighted sea, which joined a star-lighted sky and stretched in pulsating star-gleams to the end of space. She gazed straight out, but apparently she saw nothing. Her eyes were abstracted and her brow furrowed. Her shoulders drooped.

A man came bounding up the path.

"Has Ralph been here?" he asked curtly. Billy's face was fiery. His eyes blazed.

"He's been here," Julia answered immediately. "He's gone!"

"By God, I'll kill him!" Billy turned white.

Julia's brow smoothed. She smiled a little. "No, you will not kill him," she said with her old serene air. "You will not have to kill him. He will never come again."

"Did he try to make love to you?"

"Yes."

"How did he justify himself?"

"He appealed to me to save him. I did not quite understand from what. He said I could make a better man of him." Julia laughed a little.

"How did you know he was here?"

"I stopped at their cabin. He was not there. Peachy did not know where he was. Of course, I guessed at once. I came here immediately."

"Did Peachy seem troubled?"

"No. She doesn't care. Pete was there, examining her drawings. They're half in love with each other. And then again, Pete doesn't know, or if he does know, he doesn't care, that Clara is doing her damnedest to start a flirtation with Honey. And Lulu has walked about like a woman in a dream for weeks. What are we all coming to? There's nothing but flirting here!"

"It must be so," Julia said, "as long as men and women are idle."

"But how can we be anything but idle? There's nothing to do on this island."

"I don't know," said Julia slowly; "I don't know."

"Julia," Billy said in a pleading voice, "marry me!"

A strange expression came into Julia's eyes. Part of it was irresolution and part of it was terror. But a poignant wistful tenderness fused both these emotions, shot them with light.

"Not yet," she said in a terrified voice. "Not yet!"

"Why?"

"I don't know—why. Only that I cannot."

"Then, when will you marry me? Julia, I see all the others together and it——. You don't know what it does to me."

"Yes, I know! It kills me too."

"Then why wait?"

"Because——." The poignant look went for an instant from Julia's eyes. A strange brooding came in its place. "Because a little voice inside says, 'Wait!'"

"Julia, do you love me?"

Julia did not answer. She only looked at him.

"You are sure there is nobody else?"

"I am sure. There could never be anybody else—after that first night when I waked you from sleep."

"It is forever, then?"

"Forever."

Billy sighed. "I'll wait, then—until eternity shrivels up."

They sat for a long time, silent.

"Here comes somebody," Billy said suddenly. "It's one of the girls," he added after a moment of listening. "I'll leave you, I guess."

He melted into the darkness.

A woman appeared, dragging herself along by means of the rail. It was Lulu, a strange Lulu, a Lulu pallid and silent, but a Lulu shining-eyed. She pulled herself over to Julia's side. "Julia!" "Julia! Oh, Julia!"

Lulu's voice was not voice. It was not speech. Liquid sound flowed from her lips, crystallizing at the touch of the air, to words. "Julia, I came to you first, after Honey. I wanted you to know."

"Oh, Lulu," Julia said, "not——."

Her eyes reflected the stars in Lulu's eyes. And there they stood, their two faces throwing gleam for gleam.

"Yes," said Lulu. Suddenly she knelt sobbing on the floor, her face in Julia's lap.

G.

Mid-afternoon on Angel Island.

Four women sat in the Honeymoon House, sewing. Outside the world still lay in sunshine, the land cut by the beginning of shadow, the sea streaked with purple and green.

"Why didn't you bring the children?" Julia, asked.

Lulu answered. "Honey and Frank were going in swimming this morning, and they said they'd take care of them. I'm glad to get Honey-Boy off my hands for an afternoon."

"And why hasn't Peachy come?" Julia asked. "I stopped as I went by," Lulu explained. "Oh, Julia, I wish you didn't live way off here—it takes us an hour of crawling to pull ourselves along the path. Angela hadn't waked up yet. It was a longer nap than usual. Peachy said she'd come just as soon as she opened her eyes. I went in to look at her. Oh, she's such a darling, smiling in her sleep. Oh, I do hope I have a girl-baby sometime."

"I do, too," said Clara. "Peterkin's fun, of course. But I can't do the things for a boy that I could for a girl."

"I'd rather have boys," Chiquita said; "they're less trouble."

"Would you rather have boys or girls, Julia?" Lulu asked.

"Girls!" said Julia decisively. "A big family of girls."

"Then," Lulu began, and a question trembled in her bright eyes and on her curved lips.

But, "Here's Peachy!" Julia exclaimed before she could go on.

Peachy came toiling up the path, pulling herself along, both hands on the wooden rail. She tottered, but in spite of her snail-like progress, it was evident that she hurried. A tiny bundle hung between her shoulders. It oscillated gently with her haste.

"Let me take Angela," Julia said as Peachy struggled over the threshold.

"Wait!" Peachy panted. She sank on a couch.

There was a strange element in her look, an overpowering eagerness. This eagerness had brimmed over into her manner; it vibrated in her trembling voice, her fluttering hands. She sat down. She reached up and lifted the baby from her shoulders to her lap. Angela still slept, a delicate bud of a girl-being. But Peachy gave her audience no time to study the sleeping face. She turned the baby over. She pulled the single light garment off. Then she looked up at the other women.

The little naked figure lay in the golden sunlight, translucent, like an angel carved in alabaster. But on the shoulder-blades lay shadow, deep shadow—no, not shadow, a fluff of feathery down.

"Wings!" Peachy said. "My little girl is going to fly!"

"Wings!" the others repeated. "Wings!"

And then the room seemed to fill with tears that ended in laughter, and laughter that ended in tears.



VI

"They won't be home until very late tonight," announced Lulu. "The work they're doing now is hard and irritating and fussy. Honey says that they want to get through with it as soon as possible. He said they'd keep at it as long as the light lasted."

"It seems as if their working days grew longer all the time," Clara said petulantly. "They start off earlier and earlier in the morning and they stay later and later at night. And did you know that they are planning soon to stay a week at the New Camp—they say the walk back is so fatiguing after a long day's work."

The others nodded.

"And then the instant they've had their dinner," Lulu continued, "off they go to that tiresome Clubhouse—for tennis and ball and bocci. It seems, somehow, as if I never had a chance to talk with Honey nowadays. I should think they'd get enough of each other, working side by side all day long, the way they do. But no! The moment they've eaten and had their smoke, they must get together again. Why is it, I wonder? I should think they would have said all they had to say in the daytime."

"Pete is worse than any of them," Clara went on. "After he comes back from the Clubhouse, he wants to sit up and write for an hour or two. Oh, I get fairly desperate sometimes, sitting there listening to the eternal scratching of his pen. I cannot understand his point of view, to save my life. If I talk, it irritates him. My very breathing annoys him; he cannot have me in the same room with him. But if I leave the cabin, he can't write a word. He wants me near, always. He says it's the knowing I'm there that makes him feel like writing. And then Sundays, if he isn't writing, he's painting. I don't mind his not being there in the daytime in a way because, of course, there's always Peterkin. But at night, when I've put Peterkin to bed I do want something different to happen. As it is, I have to make a scene to get up any excitement. I do it, too, without compunction. When it gets to the point that I know I must scream or go crazy, I scream. And I do a good job in screaming, too."

"What would you like him to do, Clara?" Julia asked.

The petulant frown between Clara's eyebrows deepened. "I don't know," she said wearily. "I don't know what it is that I want to do; but I want to do something. Peterkin is asleep and perfectly safe—and I feel like going somewhere. Now, if I could fly, it would rest me so, to go for a long, long journey through the air." As she concluded, some new expression, some strange hardness of her maturity, melted; her face was for an instant the face of the old Clara.

Julia made no comment.

It was Chiquita who took it up.

"My husband talks enough. In fact, he talks all the time. But if I tire of his voice, I let myself fall asleep. He never notices. That is why I've grown so big. Sometimes"—discontent dulled for an instant the slow fire of her slumberous eyes—"sometimes my life seems one long sleep. If it weren't for junior, I'd feel as if I weren't quite alive."

"Ralph talks a great deal," Peachy said listlessly, "by fits and starts, and he takes me out when he comes home, if he happens to feel like walking himself. He says, though, that it exhausts him having to help me along. But it isn't that I want particularly. Often I want to go out alone. I want to soar. The earth has never satisfied me. I want to explore the heights. I want to explore them alone, and I want to explore them when the mood seizes me. And I want to feel when I come back that I can talk about it or keep silent as he does. But I must make my discoveries and explorations in my own way. Ralph sometimes gives me long talks about astronomy—he seems to think that studying about the stars will quiet me. One little flight straight up would mean more to me than all that talk. Ralph does not understand it in me, and I cannot explain it to him. And yet he feels exactly that way himself—he's always going off by himself through unexplored trails on the island. But he cannot comprehend how I, being a woman, should have the same desire. Do you remember when our wings first began to grow strong and our people kept us confined, how we beat our wings against the wall—beat and beat and beat? At times now, I feel exactly like that. Why, sometimes I envy little Angela her wings."

The five women reclined on long, low rustic couches in the big, cleared half-oval that was the Playground for their children. It began—this half-oval—in high land among the trees and spread down over a beach to the waters of a tiny cove. Between the high tapering boles of the pines at their back the sky dropped a curtain of purple. Between the long ledges of tawny rock in front the sea stretched a carpet of turquoise. And between pines and sea lay first a rusty mat of pine-needles, then a ribbon of purple stones, then a band of glittering sand. In the air the resinous smell of the pines competed with the salty tang of the ocean. High up, silver-winged gulls curved and dipped and called their creaking signals.

At the water's edge four children were playing. Honey-Boy had waded out waist-deep. A sturdy, dark, strong-bodied, tiny replica of his father, he stood in an exact reproduction of one of Honey's poses, his arms folded over his little pouter-pigeon chest, lips pursed, brows frowning, dimples inhibited, gazing into the water. Just beyond, one foot on the bottom, Peterkin pretended to swim. Peterkin had an unearthly beauty that was half Clara's coloring—combination of tawny hair with gray-green eyes—and half Pete's expression—the look, doubly strange, of the Celt and the genius. Slender and beautifully formed, graceful, he was in every possible way a contrast to virile little Billy-Boy; he was even elegant; he had the look of a story-book prince. Far up the beach, cuddled in a warm puddle, naked, sat a fat, redheaded baby, Frank Merrill, junior. He watched the others intently for a while. Then breaking into a grin which nearly bisected the face under the fiery thatch, he began an imitative paddle with his pudgy hands and feet.

Flitting hither and yon, hovering one moment at the water's edge and another at Junior's side, moving with a capricious will-o'-the-wisp motion that dominated the whole picture, flew Angela.

Beautiful as the other children were, they sank to commonplaces in contrast with Angela.

For Angela was a being of faery. Her single loose garment, serrated at the edges, knee-length, and armless, left slits at the back for a pair of wings to emerge. Tiny these wings were, and yet they were perfect in form; they soared above her head, soft, fine, shining, delicate as milkweed-down and of a white that was beginning, near the shoulders, to deepen to a pale rose. Angela's little body was as slender as a flower-stem. Her limbs showed but the faintest of curves, her skin but the faintest of tints. Almost transparent in the sunlight, she had in the shadow the coloring of the opal, pale rose-pinks and pale violet-blues. Her hair floated free to her shoulders; and that, more than any other detail, seemed to accent the quality of faery in her personality. In calm it clung to her head like a pale-gold mist; in breeze it floated away like a pale-gold nimbus. It seemed as though a shake of her head would send it drifting off—a huge thistle-down of gold. Her eyes reflected the tint of whatever blue they gazed on, whether it was the frank azure of the sky or the mysterious turquoise of the sea. And yet their look was strangely intent. When she passed from shadow to sunshine, the light seemed to dissolve her hair and wing-edges, as though it were gradually taking her to itself.

"Oh, yes, Peachy," Lulu said, "Angela's wings must be a comfort to you. You must live it all over again in her."

"I do!" answered Peachy. "I do." There was tremendous conviction in her voice, as though she were defending herself from some silent accusation. "But it isn't the same. It isn't. It can't be. Besides, I want to fly with her."

The ripples in the cove grew to little waves, to big waves, to combers. The women talked and the children played. Honey-Boy and Peterkin waded out to their shoulders, dipped, and pretended to swim back. Angela flew out to meet a wave bigger than the others, balanced on its crest. Wings outspread, she fluttered back, descended when the crash came in a shower of rainbow drops. She dipped and rose, her feathers dripping molten silver, flew on to the advancing crest.

"Oh," Lulu sighed, "I do want a little girl. I threatened if this one was a boy to drown it." "This one" proved to be a bundle lying on the pine-needles at her side. The bundle stirred and emitted a querulous protest. She picked it up and it proved to be a baby, just such another sturdy little dark creature as Honey-Boy must have been. "Your mother wouldn't exchange you for a million girls now," Lulu addressed him fondly. "I pray every night, though, that the next one will be a girl."

"I want a girl, too," Clara remarked. "Well, we'll see next spring." Clara had not been happy at the prospect of her first maternity, but she was jubilant over her second.

"It will be nice for Angela, too," Peachy said, "to have some little girl to play with. Come, baby!" she called in a sudden access of tenderness.

Angela flew down from the tip of a billow, came fluttering and flying up the beach. Once or twice, for no apparent reason, her wings fell dead, sagged for a few moments; then her little pink, shell-like feet would pad helplessly on the sand. Twice she dropped her pinions deliberately; once to climb over a big root, once to mount a boulder that lay in her path. "Don't walk, Angela!" Peachy called sharply at these times. "Fly! Fly!" And obediently, Angela stopped, waited until the strength flowed into her wings, started again. She reached the group of mothers, not by direct flight, but a complicated method of curving, arching, dipping, and circling. Peachy arose, balanced herself, caught her little daughter in midair, kissed her. The women handed her from one to the other, petting and caressing her.

Julia received her last. She sat with Angela in the curve of her arm, one hand caressing the drooped wings. It was like holding a little wild bird. With every breeze, Angela's wings opened. And always, hands, feet, hair, feathers fluttered with some temperamental unrest.

The boys tiring of the waves, came scrambling in their direction. Half-way up the beach, they too came upon the boulder in the path. It was too high and smooth for them to climb, but they immediately set themselves to do it. Peterkin pulled himself half-way up, only immediately to fall back. Junior stood for an instant imitatively reaching up with his baby hands, then abandoning the attempt waddled off after a big butterfly. Honey-Boy slipped and slid to the ground, but he was up in an instant and at it again.

Angela fluttered with baby-violence. Julia opened her arms. The child leaped from her lap, started half-running, half-flying, caught a seaward going breeze, sailed to the top of the boulder. She balanced herself there, gazing triumphantly down on Billy-Boy who, flat on his stomach, red in the face, his black eyes bulging out of his head, still pulled and tugged and strained.

"Honey-Boy's tried to climb that rock every day for three months," Lulu boasted proudly. "He'll do it some day. I never saw such persistence. If he gets a thing into his head, I can't do anything with him."

"Angela starts to climb it occasionally," Peachy said. "But, of course, I always stop her. I'm afraid she'll hurt her feet."

Above the rock stretched the bough of a big pine. As she contemplated it, a look of wonder grew in Angela's eyes, of question, of uncertainty. Suddenly it became resolution. She spread her wings, bounded into the air, fluttered upwards, and alighted squarely on the bough.

"Oh, Angela!" Peachy called anxiously. Then, joyously, "Look at my baby. She'll be flying as high as we did in a few years. Oh, how I love to think of that!"

She laughed in glee—and the others laughed with her. They continued to watch Angela's antics, their faces growing more and more gay. Julia alone did not smile; but she watched the exhibition none the less steadily.

Three years had brought some changes to the women of Angel Island; and for the most part they were devastating changes. They were still wingless. They wore long trailing garments that concealed their feet. These garments differed in color and decoration, but they were alike in one detail-floating, wing-like draperies hung from the shoulders.

Chiquita had grown so large as to be almost unwieldy. But her tropical coloring retained its vividness, retained its breath-taking quality of picturesqueness, retained its alluring languor. She sat now holding a huge fan. Indeed, since the day that Honey had piled the fans on the beach, Chiquita had never been without one in her hand. Scarlet, the scarlet of her lost pinions, seemed to be her color. Her gown was scarlet.

Lulu had not grown big, but she had grown round. That look of the primitive woman which had made her strange, had softened and sobered. Her beaute troublante had gone. Her face was, the face of a happy woman. The maternal look in her eyes was duplicated by the married look in her figure. She was always busy. Even now, though she chattered, she sewed; her little fingers fluttered like the wings of an imprisoned bird. Indeed, she looked like a little sober mother-bird in her gray and brown draperies. She was the best housewife among them. Honey lacked no creature comfort.

Clara also had filled out; in figure, she had improved; her elfin thinness had become slimness, delicately curved and subtly contoured. Also her coloring had deepened; she was like a woman cast in gold. But her expression was not pleasant. Her light, gray-green eyes had a petulant look; her thin, red lips a petulant droop. She was restless; something about her moved always. Either her long slender fingers adjusted her hair or her long slender feet beat a tattoo. And ever her figure shifted from one fluid pose to another. She wore jewels in her elaborately arranged hair, jewels about her neck, on her wrists, on her fingers. Her green draperies were embroidered in beads. She was, in fact, always dressed, costumed is perhaps the most appropriate word. She dressed Peterkin picturesquely too; she was always, studying the illustrations in their few books for ideas. Clara was one of those women at whom instinctively other women gaze—and gaze always with a question in their eyes.

Peachy was at the height of her blonde bloom; all pearl and gold, all rose and aquamarine. But something had gone out of her face—brilliance. And something had come into it—pathos. The look of a mischievous boy had turned to a wild gipsy look of strangeness, a look of longing mixed with melancholy. In some respects there was more history written on her than on any of the others. But it was tragic history. At Angela's birth Peachy had gone insane. There had come times when for hours she shrieked or whispered, "My wings! My wings! My wings!" The devoted care of the other four women had saved her; she was absolutely normal now. Her figure still carried its suggestion of a potential, young-boy-like strength, but maternity had given a droop, exquisitely feminine, to the shoulders. She always wore blue—something that floated and shimmered with every move.

Julia had changed little; for in her case, neither marriage nor maternity had laid its transmogrifying, touch upon her. Her deep blue-gray eyes—of which the brown-gold lashes seemed like reeds shadowing lonely lakes—had turned as strange as Peachy's; but it was a different strangeness. Her mouth—that double sculpturesque ripple of which the upper lip protruded an infinitesimal fraction beyond the lower one—drooped like Clara's; but it drooped with a different expression. She had the air of one who looks ever into the distance and broods on what she sees there. Perhaps because of this, her voice had deepened to a thrilling intensity. Her hair was pulled straight back to her neck from the perfect oval of her face. It hung in a single, honey-colored braid, and it hung to the very ground. She always wore white.

"Do you remember"—Chiquita began presently. Her lazy purring voice grew soft with tenderness. The dreamy, unthinking Chiquita of four years back seemed suddenly to peer through the unwieldy Chiquita of the present—"how we used to fly—and fly—and fly—just for the love of flying? Do you remember the long, bright day-flyings and the long, dark night-flyings?

"And sometimes how we used to drop like stones until we almost touched the water," Lulu said, a sparkle in her cooing, friendly little voice. "And the races! Oh, what fun! I can feel the rush of the air now."

"Over the water." Peachy flung her long, slim arms upward and a delicious smile sent the tragedy scurrying from her sunlit face. "Do you remember how wonderful it was at sunset? The sky heaving over us, shot with gold and touched with crimson. The sea pulsing under us lined with crimson and splashed with gold. And then the sunset ahead—that gold and crimson hole in the sky. We used to think we could fly through it some day and come out on another world. And sometimes we could not tell where sea and sky joined. How we flew—on and on—farther each time—on and on—and on. The risks we took! Sometimes I used to wonder if we'd ever have the strength to get home. Yet I hated to turn back. I hated to turn away from the light. I never could fly towards the east at sunset, nor towards the west at sunrise. It hurt! I used to think, when my time came to die, that I would fly out to sea—on and on till I dropped."

"I loved it most at noon," Chiquita said, "when the air was soft. It smelled sweet; a mixture of earth and sea. I used to drift and float on great seas of heat until I almost slept. That was wonderful; it was like swimming in a perfumed air or flying in a fragrant sea."

"Oh, but the storms, Julia!" Lulu exclaimed. A wild look flared in her face, wiped oft entirely its superficial look of domesticity. "Do you remember the heavy, night-black cloud, the thunder that crashed through our very bodies, the lightning that nearly blinded us, and the rain that beat us almost to pieces?"

"Oh, Lulu!" Julia said; "I had forgotten that. You were wonderful in a storm, How you used to shout and sing and leap through the air like a wild thing! I used to love to watch you, and yet I was always afraid that you would hurt yourself."

"I loved the moonlight most. I do now." The petulance went out of Clara's eyes; dreams came into its place. "The cool softness of the air, the brilliant sparkle of the stars! And then the magic of the moonlight! Young child-moon, half-grown girl-moon, voluptuous woman-moon, sallow, old-hag-moon, it was alike to me. Pete says I'm 'fey' in the moonlight. He, says I'm Irish then."

"I loved the sunrise," said Julia. "I used to steal out, when you girls were still sleeping, to fly by dawn. I'd go up, up, up. At first, it was like a huge dewdrop—that morning world—then, colder and colder—it was like a melted iceberg. But I never minded that cold and I loved the clearness. It exhilarated me. I used to run races with the birds. I was not happy until I had beaten the highest-flying of them all. Oh, it was so fresh and clean then. The world seemed new-made every morning. I used to feel that I'd caught the moment when yesterday became to-day. Then I'd sink back through layer on layer of sunlight and warm, perfume-laden, dew-damp breeze, down, down until I fell into my bed again. And all the time the world grew warmer and warmer. And I loved almost as well that instant of twilight when the world begins to fade. I used to feel that I'd caught the moment when to-day had become to-morrow. I'd fly as high as I could go then, too. Then I'd sink back through layer on layer of deepening dusk, while one by one the stars would flash out at me—down, down, down until my feet touched the water. And all the time the air grew cooler and cooler."

"My wings! My wings!" Peachy did not shriek these words with maniacal despair. She did not whisper them with dreary resignation. She breathed them with the rapture of one who looks through a narrow, dark tunnel to measureless reaches of sun-tinted cloud and sea.

"Do you remember the first time we ever saw them?" Lulu asked after a long time. This was obviously a deliberate harking back to lighter things. A gleam of reminiscence, both mischievous and tender, fired her slanting eyes.

The others smiled, too. Even Peachy's face relaxed from the look of tension that had come into it. "I often think that was the happiest time," she sighed, "those weeks before they knew we were here. At least, they knew and they didn't know. Ralph said that they all suspected that something curious was going on—but that they were so afraid that the others would joke about it, that no one of them would mention what was happening to him. Do you remember what fun it was coming to the camp when they were asleep? Do you remember how we used to study their faces to find out what kind of people they were?"

"And do you remember"—Chiquita rippled a low laugh—"how we would leap into the air if they stirred or spoke in their sleep? Once, Honey started to wake up—and we were off over the water before he could get his eyes open."

"Oh, but Honey told me that he heard us laugh that time," Lulu explained. "He told the men the next day and, oh, how they joked him."

"And then," Chiquita went on, "once Billy actually did wake up. You were bending over him, Julia. I remember we all kept as still as the dead. And you—oh, Julia, you were wonderful—you did not even breathe. He seemed to fade back into sleep again."

"He says now that I hypnotized him," Julia explained.

"Do you remember," Clara took it up, "that we even considered kidnapping one of them? If we'd known what to do with him, I think we might have tried it."

"Yes," said Chiquita. "But I think it was just as well we didn't. We wouldn't have carried it off well. There's something about them that's terrifying. Do you remember that time we saved Honey from the shark, how we trembled all the time we carried him through the air. He knew it, too—I noticed how triumphantly he smiled."

"Honey told me once"—Lulu lowered her voice—"that it was the fact that we trembled—that we seemed so much women, in spite of being creatures of the air—that made him determine to capture us."

"Well, there's something about them that weakens you," Chiquita said in a puzzled tone. "It's like a spell. At first I always felt quivery and trembly if I stood near them."

"It's power," Julia explained.

"I used even to be afraid of their voices," Chiquita went on.

"Oh, so was I," Lulu agreed. "I felt as I did when I heard thunder for the first time. It went through me. It made me shake. I was afraid, but I wanted to hear it again."

"Do you remember the first time we saw them walk!" Clara said. Her face twisted with the expression of a past loathing. "How it disgusted us! It seemed to me the most hideous motion I had ever seen—so unnatural, so ungraceful, so repellent. It took me a long time to get used to that. And as for their running—"

"It's curious how that feeling still lingers in us," exclaimed Peachy. "That contempt for the thing that walks. Occasionally Angela starts to imitate the boys—it seems as if I would fly out of my skin with horror. I shall always feel superior to Ralph, I know."

"Do you remember the first talks we ever had after we'd got our first glimpse of them?" asked Clara. "How astonished we were—and half frightened and yet—in a queer way—excited and curious?

"And after we got over our fright," Lulu carried the memories along, "and had made up our minds we didn't care whether they discovered us or not, what fun we had with them! How we played over the entire island and yet it took them such a long time to discover us."

"Oh, they're awfully stupid about seeing or guessing things," Peachy said disdainfully. "My mind always leaps way ahead of Ralph's."

"Do you remember that at first we used to have regular councils," Lulu asked, "before—before——"

"Before we agreed each to go her own way," Peachy finished it for her.

"All of us pitted against you, Julia." Chiquita sighed. "I often think now, Julia, how you used to talk to us. How you used to beg us not to go to the island. How you argued with us! The prophecies you made! They've all come true. I can hear you now: 'Don't go to the island.' 'Come away with me and we will fly back south before it is too late.' 'Come away while you can!' 'In a little while it will be too late.' In a little while I shall not be able to help you!"

"And how we fought you, Julia!" Clara said. "How we denied everything you said, every one of us knowing in her heart that you were right!"

"But," Julia said, "later, I told you that I might not be able to help myself, and you see I wasn't."

"Did they ever guess that we had quarrelled, I wonder?" Clara asked.

"Yes," Lulu answered eagerly. Honey guessed it. "Now, wasn't that clever of him?"

"Not so very," Clara replied languidly. "I guessed that they had quarrelled. And I had a strong suspicion," she added consciously, "that it was about us."

"I wonder," Peachy said somberly, "what would have happened if we had taken Julia's advice."

"Are you sorry, Peachy?" Julia asked.

"No, I'm not sorry exactly," Peachy answered slowly. "I have Angela, of course. Are you sorry, Julia?"

"No," replied Julia.

"Julia," Peachy said, "what was it changed you? I have always wanted to ask but I have never dared. What brought you to the island finally? What made you give up the fight with us?"

The far-away look in Julia's eyes grew, if possible, more far-away. She did not speak for a while. Then, "I'll tell you," she said simply. "It is something that I have never told anybody but Billy. When you first began to leave me to come to this island alone, I was very unhappy. And I grew more and more unhappy. I missed flying with you. And especially flying by night. Flying alone seemed melancholy. I came here at first, only because I was driven by my loneliness. I said to myself that I'd drift with the current. But that did not help any. You were all so interested in your lovers that it made no difference whether I was with you or not. I began to think that you no longer cared for me, that you had out-grown me, that all my influence over you had vanished, that, if I were out of the way, the one tie which held you to me would break and you would go to these men. I grew more and more unhappy every instant. That was not all. I was in love with Billy, but I did not know it. I only knew that I was moody and strange and in desperate despair. And, so, one day I decided to kill myself."

There was a faint movement in the group, but it was only the swish of draperies as the four recumbent women came upright. They stared at Julia. They did not speak. They seemed scarcely to breathe.

"One day, I flew up and up. Never before had I gone half so high. But I flew deliberately higher and higher until I became cold and colder and numb and frozen—until my wings stopped. And then—" She paused.

"What happened?" Clara asked breathlessly.

"I dropped. I dropped like a stone. But—but—the instant I let myself go, something strange happened—a miracle of self-revelation. I knew that I loved Billy, that I could not live in any world where he could not come to me. And the instant that I realized that I loved him, I knew also that I could not die. I tried to spread my wings but they would not open. It was terrific. And that sense of despair, that my wings which had always responded—would not—now—oh, that was hell. How I fought! How I struggled! It was as though iron bands were about me. I strained. I tore. Of course, all this was only a moment. But one thinks a million things in a moment like that—one lives a thousand years. It seemed an eternity. At last my wings opened and spread. They held. I floated until I caught my breath. Then I dropped slowly. I threw myself over the bough of a tree. I lay there."

There was an interval of intense silence.

"Did you faint?" Peachy asked in an awed voice.

"I wept."

"You wept, Julia?" Peachy said. "You!"

"I had not wept since my childhood. It was strange. It frightened me almost as much as the fall. Oh, how fast the tears came—and in such floods! Something melted and went away from me then. A softness came over me. It was like a spell. I have never been the same creature since. I cry easily now."

"Did you tell Billy?" Clara asked.

"He saw me," Julia answered.

"He saw—." It came from her four listeners as from one woman.

"That's what changed him. That's what determined him to help capture us. He said that he was afraid I would try it again. I wouldn't have, though."

Nobody spoke for a long time.

"Julia! It was Chiquita who broke the silence this time. There is something I, too, have always wanted to ask you. But I have never dared before. What was it tempted you to go into the Clubhouse that day? At first you tried to keep us from going in. You never seemed to care for any of the things they gave us. You threw away the fans and the slippers and the scarfs. And you smashed your mirror."

"Billy asked me this same question once," Julia answered. "It was that big diamond—the Wilmington 'Blue.' I caught a glimpse of it through the doorway as it lay all by itself on the table, flashing in the sunlight. I had never before in my life seen any thing that I really wanted. But this was so exquisite, so chiseled, so tiny, so perfect, There was so much fire and color in it. It seemed like a living creature. I was enchanted by it. When I told Billy, he laughed. He said that the lust for diamonds was a recognized earth-disease among earth-people, especially earth-women. He said that many women had been ruined by it. He said that it was a common saying among men that you could catch any woman in a trap baited with diamonds. I have never got over the sting of that. I blush always when I think of it. Because—although I don't exactly understand why—it was not quite true in my case. That is a thing which always bothers me in conversation with the men. They talk about us as if they knew all about us. You'd think they'd invented us. Not that we're not simple enough. We're perfectly simple, but they've never bothered to study us. They say so many things about us, for instance, that are only half true—and yet I don't know exactly how to confute them. None of us would presume to say such things about them. I'm glad," she ended with a sudden fierceness, "that I threw the diamond away."

"Julia," and now it was Lulu who questioned, "why do you not marry Billy when you love him so?" The seriousness of her tone, the warmth of affection in her little brown face robbed this question of any appearance of impertinence.

"Lulu," Julia answered simply, "I don't know why. Only that something inside has always said, 'Wait!'"

"Well, you did well," Peachy said bitterly, "for, at least, Billy loves you just as much as at first. I don't see him racing over to the Clubhouse the moment his dinner is eaten. I don't see him spending his Sundays in long exploring tramps. I don't see him making plans to go off into the interior for a week at a time."

"But he would be just like all the others, Julia," Clara exclaimed carefully, "if you'd married him. Keep out of it as long as you can!"

"Don't ever marry him, Julia," Chiquita warned. "Keep your life a perpetual wooing."

"Marry him to-morrow, Julia," Lulu advised. "Oh, I cannot think what my life would have been without Honey-Boy and Honey-Bunch."

"I shall marry Billy sometime," Julia said. "But I don't know when. When that little inner voice stops saying, 'Wait!'"

"I wonder," Peachy questioned again, "what would have happened if—"

"It would have come out just the same way. Depend on that!" Chiquita said philosophically. "It was our fate—the Great Doom that our people used to talk of. And, after all, it's our own fault. Come to this island we would and come we did! And this is the end of it—we—we sit moveless from sun-up to sun-down, we who have soared into the clouds. But there is a humorous element in it. And if I didn't weep, I could laugh myself mad over it. We sit here helpless and watch these creatures who walk desert us daily—desert us—creatures who flew—leave us here helpless and alone."

"But in the beginning," Lulu interposed anxiously, "they did try to take us with them. But it tired them so to carry us—for or that's—what in effect they do."

"And there was one time just after we were married when it was all wonderful," said Peachy. "I did not even miss the flying, for it seemed to me that Ralph made up for the loss of my wings by his love and service. Then, they began to build the New Camp and gradually everything changed. You see, they love their work more than they do us. Or at least it seems to interest them more."

"Why not?" Julia interpolated quietly. "We're the same all the time. We don't change and grow. Their work does change and grow. It presents new aspects every day, new questions and problems and difficulties, new answers and solutions and adjustments. It makes them think all the time. They love to think." She added this as one who announces a discovery, long pondered over. "They enjoy thinking."

"Yes," Lulu agreed wonderingly, "that's true, isn't it? That never occurred to me. They really do like thinking. How curious! I hate to think."

"I never think," Chiquita announced.

"I won't think," Peachy exclaimed passionately. "I feel. That's the way to live."

"I don't have to think," Clara declared proudly. "I've something better than thought-instinct and intuition."

Julia was silent.

"Julia is like them," Lulu said, studying Julia's absent face tenderly. "She likes to think. It doesn't hurt, or bother, or irritate, or tire—or make her look old. It's as easy for her as breathing. That's why the men like to talk to her."