him into the building. He was not alone, however. The door at the
center of the partitioning wall had opened while he spoke, and a
slender blonde girl in the briefest of white sunsuits was looking at
him.

* * * * *

Apparently she had not expected Oliver, for there was open interest in
her clear green eyes. She said something in a clear and musical--but
completely unintelligible--voice that ranged, with a remarkably
operatic effect, through two full octaves.

Oliver stared. "I'm here to doctor the sick bear," he said.

"Oh, a _native_," the girl said in English.

Obviously she was trying to keep her voice within the tonal range of
his own, but in spite of the effort it trilled distractingly up and
down the scale in a fashion that left Oliver smitten with a sudden and
unfamiliar weakness of the knees.

"May I help?" she said.

She might, Oliver replied. She could have had as readily, he might
have added, a pint of his blood.

Many times while they worked, finding a suitable squeeze-cage and
dragging it against the bear's larger cage so that the two doors
coincided, Oliver found the prim and reproachful image of Miss Orella
Simms rising to remind him of his obligations; but for the first time
in his life an obligation was surprisingly easy to dismiss. His
assistant's lively conversation, which was largely uninformative
though fascinatingly musical, bemused him even to the point of
shrugging off his Aunt Katisha's certain disapproval.

The young lady, it seemed, came from a foreign country whose name was
utterly unpronounceable; Oliver gathered that she had not been long
with Mr. Furnay, who was of another nationality, and that she was
homesick for her native land--for its "saffron sun on turquoise hills
and umber sea," which could only be poetic exaggeration or simple
unfamiliarity with color terms of a newly learned language--and that
she was as a consequence very lonely.

She was, incredibly, a trainer of animals.

"Not of such snarling fierce ones as yours," she said, with a little
shiver for the polar bear watching them sullenly through the bars,
"but of my own gentle beasts, who are friends."

Her name was a startling combination of soprano sounds that might have
been written as Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above, but which Oliver was
completely unable to manage.

"Would you mind," he asked, greatly daring, "if I called you Pearl
instead?"

She would not. But apparently