became to-day.  Then I’d sink back through layer on layer of sunlight and warm, perfume-laden, dew-damp breeze, down, down until I fell into my bed again.  And all the time the world grew warmer and warmer.  And I loved almost as well that instant of twilight when the world begins to fade.  I used to feel that I’d caught the moment when to-day had become to-morrow.  I’d fly as high as I could go then, too.  Then I’d sink back through layer on layer of deepening dusk, while one by one the stars would flash out at me — down, down, down until my feet touched the water.  And all the time the air grew cooler and cooler.”

“My wings!  My wings!” Peachy did not shriek these words with maniacal despair.  She did not whisper them with dreary resignation.  She breathed them with the rapture of one who looks through a narrow, dark tunnel to measureless reaches of sun-tinted cloud and sea.

“Do you remember the first time we ever saw them?” Lulu asked after a long time.  This was obviously a deliberate harking back to lighter things.  A gleam of reminiscence, both mischievous and tender, fired her slanting eyes.

The others smiled, too.  Even Peachy’s face relaxed from the look of tension that had come into it.  “I often think that was the happiest time,” she sighed, “those weeks before they knew we were here.  At least, they knew and they didn’t know.  Ralph said that they all suspected that something curious was going on — but that they were so afraid that the others would joke about it, that no one of them would mention what was happening to him.  Do you remember what fun it was coming to the camp when they were asleep?  Do you remember how we used to study their faces to find out what kind of people they were?”

“And do you remember” — Chiquita rippled a low laugh — “how we would leap into the air if they stirred or spoke in their sleep?  Once, Honey started to wake up — and we were off over the water before he could get his eyes open.”

“Oh, but Honey told me that he heard us laugh that time,” Lulu explained.  “He told the men the next day and, oh, how they joked him.”

“And then,” Chiquita went on, “once Billy actually did wake up.  You were bending over him, Julia.  I remember we all kept as still as the dead.  And you — oh, Julia, you were wonderful — you did not even breathe.  He seemed to fade back into sleep again.”

“He says now that I hypnotized him,” Julia explained.

“Do you remember,” Clara took it up, “that we even considered kidnapping one of them?  If we’d known what to do with him, I think we might have tried it.”

“Yes,” said Chiquita.  “But I think it was just as well we didn’t.  We wouldn’t have carried it off well.  There’s something about them that’s terrifying.  Do you remember that time we saved Honey from the shark, how we trembled all the time we carried him through the air.  He knew it, too - I noticed how triumphantly he smiled.”