“Oh, yes!” said Dickory, and he spoke the truth.

“She goes up to the very top,” said Lena, “to look for ships.  I would never do that; I’d rather never see a ship than to climb to the top of such a tree.  I’ll show it to you in a minute; we’re almost there.”

At a little distance from the rest of the forest and upon a bluff which overlooked a stretch of lowland, and beyond that the bay, stood a tall tree with spreading branches and heavy foliage.

“Up in the top of that is where she sits,” said the child, “and spies out for ships.  That’s what she’s doing now.  Don’t you see her up there?”

“Your sister in the tree!” exclaimed Dickory.  And his first impulse was to retire, for it had been made quite plain to him that he was not expected to present himself to the young lady of the house, should she be on the ground or in the air.  But he did not retire.  A voice came to him from the tree-top, and as he looked upward he saw the same bright face which had greeted him over the top of the bushes.  Below it was a great bunch of heavy leaves.

“So you have come to call on me, have you?” said the lady in the tree.  “I am glad to see you, but I’m sorry that I cannot ask you to come upstairs.  I am not receiving.”

“He could not come up if he wanted to,” said Lena; “he couldn’t climb a tree like that.”

“And he doesn’t want to,” cried the nymph of the bay-tree.  “I have been up here all the morning,” said she, “looking for ships, but not one have I seen.”

“Isn’t that a tiresome occupation?” asked Dickory.

“Not altogether,” she said.  “The branches up here make a very nice seat, and I nearly always bring a book with me.  You will wonder how we get books, but we had a few with us when we were marooned, and since that my father has always asked for books when he has an opportunity of trading off his hides.  But I have read them all over and over again, and if it were not for the ships which I expect to come here and anchor, I am afraid I should grow melancholy.”

“What sort of ships do you look for?” asked Dickory, who was gazing upward with so much interest that he felt a little pain in the back of his neck, and who could not help thinking of a framed engraving which hung in his mother’s little parlour, and which represented some angels composed of nothing but heads and wings.  He saw no wings under the head of the charming young creature in the tree, but there was no reason which he could perceive why she should not be an angel marooned upon a West Indian island.

“There are a great many of them,” said she, “and they’re all alike in one way—­they never come.  But there’s one of them in particular which I look for and look for and look for, and which I believe that some day I shall really see.  I have thought about that ship so often and I have dreamed about it so often that I almost know it must come.”

“Is it an English ship?” asked Dickory, speaking with some effort, for he found that the girl’s voice came down much more readily than his went up.