Andrew the Glad

"Please don't be--because I am, too," he answered. And instinctively,

like two children, they drew close together. They both gazed at the

specter sketch spread before them and drew still nearer to each other.

"I have been planning it for days," he said in almost a whisper. Her

small pink ear was very near his lips and his breath agitated two little

gold tendrils that blew across it. "I want to build it before I go away,

it is needed here for the hunting. I came out and made the sketch from

right here an hour ago. I came back--I must have come back to have

it--verified." He laughed softly, and for just a second his fingers

rested against hers on the edge of the sketch.

"I'm still frightened," she said, but a tippy little smile coaxed at the

corners of her mouth. She turned her face away from his eyes that had

grown--disturbing.

"I'm not," he announced boldly. "Beautiful wild things are flying loose

all over the world and why shouldn't we capture one for ourselves. Do you

mind--please don't!"

"I don't think I do," she answered, and her lashes swept her cheeks

as she lifted the sketch-book to her knees. "Only suppose I was to

dream--some of your--other work--some day? I don't want to build your

bridges--but I might want to--write some of your poems. Hadn't you better

do something to stop me right now?" The smile had come to stay and

peeped roguishly out at him from beneath her lashes.

"No," he answered calmly, "if you want my dreams--they are yours."

"Oh," she said as she rose to her feet and looked down at him wistfully,

"your beautiful, beautiful dreams! Ever since that afternoon I have gone

over and over the lines you read me. The one about the 'brotherhood of

our heart's desires' keeps me from being lonely. I think--I think I went

to sleep saying it to myself last night and--"

It couldn't go on any longer--as Andrew rose to his feet he gathered

together any stray wreckage of wits that was within his reach and

managed, by not looking directly at her, to say in a rational, elderly,

friendly tone, slightly tinged with the scientific: "My dear child, and that's why you built my bridge for me to-day. You

put yourself into mental accord with me by the use of my jingle last

night and fell asleep having hypnotized yourself with it. Things wilder

than fancies are facts these days, written in large volumes by extremely

erudite old gentlemen and we believe them because we must. This is a

simple case, with a well-known scientific name and--"

"But," interrupted Caroline Darrah, and as she stood away from him

against the dim hills, her slender figure seemed poised as if for flight,

and a hurt young seriousness was in her lifted purple eyes: "I don't want

it to be a 'simple case' with any scientific--" and just here a merry

call interrupted her from up-stream.