“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.”