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But to-day, ah! who would have dreamed that sweet little Bab could become such a fright? She had done up her hair the night before on as many as twenty curl-papers. Before starting for the air-castle she had taken out some of the papers and found not ringlets, but wisps of very unruly hair. It would not curl any more than water will run up hill.
Miriam sat down quietly on the other side of the room. Her eyes were glittering and she was moving her hands nervously. This dreadful anniversary had, for her, its own particular significance. Upstairs, Barbara, light-hearted and hopeful, was singing to herself while she pinned on the last of the price tags and built her air-castle. The song came down lightly, yet discordantly.
That he would almost certainly marry before he could well afford it, and thus overweight himself in his battle for success. He forgot prudence and common-sense, and that being what a lover usually does, he can hardly be blamed for it. Bump! Down came the air-castle. Home, fireside, and the slate-colored eyes dissolved into a wooden wharf. The dream was over.
In his air-castle building Myles had pictured the Earl receiving him as the son of his one-time comrade in arms receiving him, perhaps, with somewhat of the rustic warmth that he knew at Crosbey-Dale; but now, as he stared at those massive walls from below, and realized his own insignificance and the greatness of this great Earl, he felt the first keen, helpless ache of homesickness shoot through his breast, and his heart yearned for Crosbey-Holt again.
Mary Lee sat staring at the paper before her with dazed, tear-blinded eyes, as bit by bit her innocent little air-castle crumbled into nothingness. Then her glance fell on the words she had written, and laying her face down on them she began to sob. "Dear old father," she whispered, brokenly. "I asked them for bread and they gave me a stone. And it's because you have to work.
So Charming Billy, tilted back in his chair and watching with half-shut eyes the intangible smoke-wreath from his cigarette, found words for his own particular air-castle which he had builded on sunny days when the Double-Crank herds grazed peacefully around him; or on stormy nights when he sat alone in the line-camp and played solitaire with the mourning wind crooning accompaniment; or on long rides alone, when the trail was plain before him and the grassland stretched away and away to a far sky-line, and the white clouds sailed sleepily over his head and about him the meadowlarks sang.
"When I am ready, I shall put all this away," he continually assured his inner consciousness. Then into the delicious charm of his air-castle he leaped again, mind and body. In those days he grew perceptibly younger. The fire of youth lit his eyes. He fed on the stimulants of sweet dreams, and for the time they nourished as well as exhilarated.
He was thinking at the rate of a million thoughts a minute, it seemed to him, and he was afraid to let go of himself and say what he thought. One thing he knew beyond all doubt, and that was that he must be careful or he would see his air-castle blow up in small fragments and come down a hopeless ruin. He needed time to think, and Billy Louise was not giving him even a minute.
The children ran, and so indeed did the older ones, for there was an excellent path all the way. "So that is the air-castle," exclaimed Kyzie, when they were all within sight of it. "It's a real house, built right in the mountain." She was right. There happened to be a great crack right here in the rocky side of the mountain, and a cunning little house had been tucked into the crack.
She gazed at the bright shaft of silver it made across all her familiar possessions, and, notwithstanding her young girl dreams were gone, she realized that, although she had lost all the usual celestial dreams and rafters of romance which go to make a young girl's air-castle, she had still left some material, even if of less importance. She spent, on the whole, a very happy summer.
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