"But you shouldn't do that!" cried Nathalie, rather shocked at the idea of simulating pain, suddenly remembering a story she had heard of a young girl who had finally come to suffer from the very disease she had feigned.

"Oh, what difference does it make as long as it brings him?" retorted the princess. "You see he tells me of the outside world, and makes me laugh when I have pain, for I do have lots of it sometimes. One day when I was having an awful time with my back he almost made me forget the pain by telling me some of the funny things that have happened to the Boy Scouts and to the Girl Pioneers.

"He told me all about you, too, how you sprained your foot and about your brother d.i.c.k, and about your finding the blue robin's nest in the old cedar. He said you were pretty, too. I like pretty people. I wish you didn't have that horrible thing on your eyes, I want to see them.

Mother said I would have been pretty, too, if I had not had this terrible hump-oh," she cried abruptly, "I was not to tell you anything about myself, for I'm a horrible thing to look at now."

"Oh, no, you can't be," exclaimed Nathalie involuntarily, for by this time the sweet girlish voice and soft clinging hand had stirred her imagination, and the pictures presented had made the make-believe princess a most beautiful creature.

"Oh, but I am," persisted the girl in a resigned voice. "But then, do tell me about the Pioneers!" Then noting Nathalie's reluctance, she called out in a high, shrill voice, "Mamma, come here, I want you!"

"What is it, darling?" answered her mother coming hastily from the adjoining room, where she had been conversing with the doctor. "What does my princess want?" remembering the role the girl had a.s.sumed.

"The princess wants to be obeyed," answered that personage imperiously.

"Miss Page refuses to talk about herself or to tell me anything, because she says you ordered her to tell me only stories."

Nathalie's face reddened under her black mask, "Oh, no," she interposed swiftly, "I did not say it that way. I said the doctor had asked me to come here and tell you stories, but then I supposed you were a little girl."

"No, I am not a little girl," replied the princess, "I am fourteen."

"Miss Page, if you do not mind I shall be glad if you will do as Ni-as-the princess desires," said her mother pleadingly. "She is an invalid, you know, and, I am afraid, sadly spoiled."

"Very well," rejoined Nathalie briefly, feeling somewhat relieved to think she could talk about the Pioneers and not to have to think up a story. Yet it did seem strange to ask her to come there and tell stories and then ask her not to do so.

"Now that you have permission, please go right ahead and tell me everything you know about the Pioneers!"

"That will be delightfully easy, I can a.s.sure you," exclaimed Nathalie.

"Although I am a new Pioneer, I am beginning to be very enthusiastic. I can't tell you much about the hikes for I have never been on a long hike yet. We were going on a bird hike the other day-" then she remembered the search party and its results, and in a few words told about Rosebud and the morning spent in searching for her.

"Oh, that was just fine of you," cried the princess as Nathalie came to the part where the Pioneers had acted as if they did not want to hunt for the little girl. "And those girls! I think they were very selfish, but go on and tell me some more about the Pioneers!"

Nathalie, thus pressed, told of the Pilgrim Rally, the coming of the Boy Scouts, the Pioneer dance, and then lastly how she had accepted Miss I Can, the motto of the organization, as a very dear friend, and how she was trying to live up to it. The girl could not account for the feeling that made her sacrifice her usual reserve in regard to her inner life, and tell this make-believe princess about what she was trying to do. In thinking it over when by herself, she concluded that perhaps it was the lesson in this little motto that she had intuitively felt might help the little prisoner in the tower.

"Oh, I wish you would get up a story club for me!" exclaimed the blood royal, as Nathalie finally ended her Pioneer recital by telling about the story club the girls had formed to tell stories to the little children in the colored settlement.

"Wouldn't it be just lovely! And they would all be real live girls, too, not story-book people, for oh, Miss Page, I get so tired of book folks!

I want to meet just real every-day girls. That is why I coaxed my mother to get the doctor to have you come here and tell me stories, but don't say another word about telling me stories," she lowered her voice, "for that was just a trick to get Mother to consent. When I want a thing I just keep plaguing her and then she lets me have my way."

"Oh, but you ought to tell your mother everything," exclaimed her new friend, somewhat repelled by this frank admission of deceit. "I always tell my mother everything, why I could not sleep at night if I thought I had deceived her."

"Everything is fair in love and war, that's what my governess used to say, but she was a horrid thing," the princess confessed candidly; "I just hated her. She had a beau and I used to steal his letters and pretend I had read them, just for the fun of seeing her get in a rage.

But go on, and tell me more about those girls."

The last word had barely left her lips when a shriek, shrill and terrifying, rang through the room. Nathalie jumped up in a spasm of terror, but before she could ascertain what it was, another one, even shriller and more prolonged than the first one, as it seemed to the frightened girl, sounded right in her very ear. Her heart leaped to her throat, a stifled cry escaped her as she dropped back in her chair cowering with fear. Then came another cry, followed by weird, demoniacal laughter. Nathalie put her hands up to her face determined to tear off her bandage, for that blood-curdling shriek, that hideous laugh, she had heard before-and then she remembered-oh, she was in the house of the Mystic!

CHAPTER XII-THE WILD FLOWER HIKE

"Oh, it's the crazy man!" came with a flash into Nathalie's mind. What should she do? If she could only take off that horrible bandage from her eyes!

"Oh, don't be frightened!" exclaimed the princess with a merry laugh as she saw her companion cower in her chair. "It's only Jimmie! Jimmie, stop that racket!" she continued with a loud clap of her hands. But Jimmie, whoever he was, only replied with another agonizing shriek. This time the princess called angrily, "Mamma, come and make Jimmie stop his shrieking. Miss Page is awfully frightened!"

Nathalie, as she heard the foregoing explanation, and realized that it was not an insane person screaming, gave a hysterical gasp and turned her head in the direction of the shrieks, but alas! her blinders, like a black wall, barred her vision.

A few hurried steps, a scuffle evidently, accompanied by the loud flapping of wings, and then a jumble of French, Spanish, and English, jabbered in defiant rage, revealed that Jimmie was a c.o.c.katoo!

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Oh, don't be frightened!" exclaimed the princess, with a merry laugh.]

But Jimmie, determined not to be worsted in his fight to be heard, with much loudness and clearness of note now broke into "In the Sweet Bye and Bye." This sudden transition from the terrestrial to the celestial proved too much for Jimmie's audience, and peals of laughter rang out, in which Nathalie's treble and the doctor's deeper note mingled with the c.o.c.katoo's song. Jimmie, thinking he was winning an encore, started in with "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief-" but this time he was summarily thrust from the room by an attendant-amid jabbering protests.

The doctor now reminded Nathalie that they must be going, as he had an important case on hand; he had waited for her, he explained, knowing that she would be unable to manage alone with her blinders, as he called the handkerchief.

As Nathalie rose to go the princess seized her hand, crying, "No, you shall not go. You have only been here a few moments!" Notwithstanding her mother's admonition that the doctor must not be detained, the invalid persisted in clutching her new friend's hand in a vise-like grip, much to her embarra.s.sment. Finding, however, that she was not to have her way, the princess broke forth into a low whimpering.

Nathalie stood still, and then feeling ashamed that a girl of her age should act the part of a child of five, endeavored to persuade her to let her go, promising to come again soon. She met with no success, and driven desperate by the command, "Come, Nathalie, we must go!" she roughly pulled her hand away. Whereupon, the whimpering cries of the princess degenerated into shrieks of rage, so prolonged and shrill that Nathalie, with a thrill of surprise, immediately recognized from whom Jimmie had learned his shrieks.

As the car sped swiftly along in the direction of home, after the black handkerchief had been relegated to the doctor's pocket again, Nathalie suddenly reddened furiously, looked queer for a moment, and then burst into stifled laughter, much to the doctor's amus.e.m.e.nt, who was gravely watching her.

"h.e.l.lo!" he cried at length, "what's up?" after his companion had made one or two ineffectual efforts to control her risibility.

But at last she sobered, and with the tears still in her eyes told how she and Grace had been sent by Mrs. Morrow a short time before-to deliver a letter to Mrs. Van Vorst, and how when they were waiting in the reception room they had heard those same terrible shrieks and frenzied laughter that Jimmie had emitted that morning, and, thinking that it was an insane person, they had run for their lives.

"O dear," she gasped hysterically, "what a joke on Grace and me! To think of our running away when it was only a c.o.c.katoo! Oh, what sillies we were!"

"I agree with you," returned the doctor so solemnly that the girl flushed and looked at him quickly with shamed eyes, but his humorous twinkle did not agree with his blunt a.s.surance, so Nathalie's self-esteem suffered no wound.

"You know where you were then to-day?" questioned the doctor slowly after a pause.

"Oh, yes, at the house of the Mystic!"

"The house of the Mystic?" with some astonishment.

"Oh, that is the name the girls have given Mrs. Van Vorst because she acts so queerly. She has been very disagreeable to the Pioneers, they claim, refusing to let them drill on the lawn in the rear of her house.

The girls say she hates young people, and then she always dresses so queerly in gray, too. She has shrouded herself in mystery by shutting herself up in that big gray house behind those walls. Edith Whiton insists that there is an insane person in the house and that he chased her the day of the Pilgrim Rally."

"An insane person! There is no insane person in the house. That is nonsense, and should not be repeated!" exclaimed the doctor in an annoyed tone.

"Yes, I know, but the girls believe Edith, and so did I until to-day.

But Grace and I have never told a soul what we heard, only Mrs. Morrow.

But, oh, Doctor," she cried impulsively, "can't I tell Grace about the c.o.c.katoo? I will tell her not to tell a living soul," she ended earnestly.

"No," returned the doctor decidedly, "Miss Grace is all right, but she might let it out in her sleep. No, you wait, and some time you girls can have the best laugh ever, as my kiddies say."

So the story of Nathalie's visit to the princess in the tower was buried deep within her heart, although it came very near being unearthed several times when she was in the company of Grace or Helen, for really, it was hard to keep it a secret when it was such a good joke.

Sat.u.r.day, the day of the wild-flower hike, was warm and sunshiny, with the balminess of summer in its gently wafting breezes. Every one present was filled with the antic.i.p.ation that they were going to have a "dandy time."