Then Addington leaped like a cat from the bushes at her right.  Simultaneously Honey pounced in her direction from the left.

But — whir-r-r-r — it was like the beating of a tremendous drum.  Straight across the pond she went, her toes shirring the water, and up and up and up — then off.  And all the time she laughed, a delicious, rippling laughter which seemed to climb every scale that could carry coquetry.

The two men stood impotently watching her for a moment.  Then Honey broke into roars of delight.  “Oh, you kid!” he called appreciatively to her.  “She had her nerve with her to sit still all the time, knowing that we were creeping up on her, didn’t she?” He turned to Ralph.

But Ralph did not answer, did not hear.  His face was black with rage.  He shook his fist in Peachy’s direction.

Of the flying-girls, there remained now only one who held herself aloof, the “quiet one.”  It was many weeks before she visited the island.  Then she came often, though always alone.  There was something in her attitude that marked her off from the others.

“She doesn’t come because she wants to,” Billy Fairfax explained.  “She comes because she’s lonely.”

The “quiet one” habitually flew high and kept high, so high indeed that, after the first excitement of her tardy appearance, none but Billy gave her more than passing attention.  Up to that time Billy had been a hard, a steady worker.  But now he seemed unable to concentrate on anything.  It was doubtless an extra exasperation that the “quiet one” puzzled him.  Her flying seemed to be more than a haphazard way of passing the time.  It seemed to have a meaning; it was almost as if she were trying to accomplish something by it; and ever she perfected the figure that her flight drew on the sky.  If she soared and dropped, she dropped and soared.  If she curved and floated, she floated and curved.  If she dipped and leaped, she leaped and dipped.  All this he could see.  But there were scores of minor evolutions that appeared to him only as confused motion.

One thing he caught immediately.  Those lonely gyrations were not the exercise of the elusive coquetry which distinguished Peachy.  It was more that the “quiet one” was pushed on by some intellectual or artistic impulse, that she expressed by the symbols, of her complicated flight some theory, some philosophy of life, that she traced out some artless design, some primary pattern of beauty.

Julia always seemed to shine; she wore garments of gleamy-petalled, white flowers, silvery seaweeds, pellucid marsh-grasses, vines, golden or purple, that covered her with a delicate lustre.  Her wings were different from the others; theirs flashed color, but hers gave light; and that light seemed to have run down on her flesh.

“What the thunder is she trying to do up there?” Ralph asked one day, stopping at Billy’s side.  Ralph’s question was not in reality begotten so much of curiosity as of irritation.  From the beginning the “quiet one” had interested him least of any of the flying-girls as, from the beginning, Peachy had interested him most.