The Honeymoon House thrilled with excitement.  At intervals figures crowded to the narrow door; at intervals faces crowded in the narrow window.  Sometimes it was Lulu, swollen and purple and broken with weeping.  Sometimes it was Chiquita, pale and blurred and sagging with tears.  Often it was Peachy, whose look, white and sodden, steadily searched the distance.  Below on the sand, Clara, shriveled, pinched, bent over, her hands writhing in and out of each other’s clasp, paced back and forth, her eye moving always on the path.  Suddenly she stopped and listened.  There came first a faint disturbance of the air, then confusion, then the pounding of feet.  Angela, white-faced, frightened, appeared, flying above the trail.  “I found him,” she called.  Behind came Billy, running.  He flashed past Clara.

“How is she?” he panted.

“Alive,” Clara said briefly.

He flew up the steps.  Clara followed.  Angela dropped to the sand and Jay there, her little head in the crook of her elbow, sobbing.

Inside a murmur of relief greeted Billy.  “He’s come, Julia,” Peachy whispered softly.

The women withdrew from the inner room as Billy passed over the threshold.

Julia lay on the couch stately and still.  One long white hand rested on her breast.  The other stretched at her side; its fingers touched a little bundle there.  Her wings — the glorious pinions of her girlhood — towered above the pillow, silver-shining, quiescent.  Her honey-colored hair piled in a huge crown above her brow.  Her eyes were closed.  Her face was like marble; but for an occasional faint movement of the hand at her side, she might have been the sculpture on a tomb.

Her lids flickered as Billy approached, opened on eyes as dull as stones.  But as they looked up into his, they filled with light.

“My husband — " she said.  Her eyes closed.

But presently they opened and with a greater dazzle of light.  “Our son — " The hand at her side moved feebly on the little bundle there.  That faint movement seemed a great effort.  Her eyes closed again.

But for a third time she opened them, and now they shone with their greatest glory.  “My husband — our son — has — wings.”

And then Julia’s eyes closed for the last time The Project Gutenberg Etext of Angel Island by Inez Haynes Gillmore ******This file should be named angis10.txt or angis10.zip******

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