“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.