“I wish you were a boy, Christie!” he brought out abruptly.

Something in the peevish gravity of this must have tickled her fancy, for she smiled at him with a free, unrestrained, schoolgirlish smile.

“I used to wish that myself,” she murmured gently; and then she sighed, her smile fading as quickly as it had come.

He knitted his heavy eyebrows and scowled at her in deep thought.

Two persistent sounds forced their identities into his drugged consciousness. The first was the brazen clamour of the whirligig engines. The second was the whistling of a blackbird. This latter sound had already assumed that peculiar mellowness which meant that the sunrays were falling horizontally upon that spot, and that the long March afternoon was drawing to its close.