Angel Island

Five minutes went by, and ten and fifteen and twenty. Peachy still sat

silent, moveless, meditative. Not once did she lift her eyelids.

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.