sense of excitement, an
odd and unaccountable premonition that something was going to happen.
This queer thing had come to her in the middle of lunch and had made
her heart suddenly begin to race. If she had been given to self
analysis, which she was not, she might have told herself that she had
received a wireless message from some one as lonely as herself, who had
sent out the S.O.S. call in the hope of its being picked up and
answered. As it was, it stirred her blood and made her restless and
intensely eager to get into the open, to feel the sun and smell the
sweetness in the air and listen to the cheery note of the birds.

It was with something of the excited interest which must have stirred
Robinson Crusoe on seeing the foot-prints on the sand of what he had
conceived to be a desert island that she ran up the hill, through the
awakened woods whose thick carpet of brown leaves was alight with the
green heads of young ferns, and out to the clearing from which she had
so often gazed wist fully in the direction of the great city away in
the distance.

She was surprised to find that she was alone as usual, bitterly
disappointed to see no other sign of life than her friends the rabbits
and the squirrels--the latter of which ambled toward her in the
expectation of peanuts. She had no sort of concrete idea of what she
had expected to find: nor had she any kind of explanation of the wave
of sympathy that had come to her as clearly as though it had been sent
over an electric wire. All she knew was that she was out of breath for
no apparent reason, and on the verge of tears at seeing no one there to
meet her. Once before, on her sixth birth day, the same call had been
sent to her when she was playing alone with her dolls in the
semitropical garden of a hired house in Florida, and she had started up
and toddled round to the front and found a large-eyed little girl
peering through the gate. It was the beginning of a close and blessed
friendship.

This time, it seemed, the call had been meant for some other lonely
soul, and so she stood and looked with blurred eyes over the wide
valley that lay unrolled at her feet and, asked herself what she had
ever done to deserve to be left out of all the joy of life. From
somewhere near by the baying of hounds came, and from a farm to her
left the crowing of a cock; and then a twig snapped behind her, and she
turned eagerly.

"Oh, hello," said the boy.

"Oh, hello," she said.

He