"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.