In his weak
mood they had the effect of a spanked boy's last whimpers.
He was a boy, and fate was spanking him hard. He could not have whom
he wanted, and he resolved that there was nothing else in the world
to want. And all the time there was a girl sleeping out in Crotona
Park on the ground. She was pretty and dangerous, another flower
tossing on the girl-tree.
CHAPTER XIII
When the daylight whitened the black air it found Dyckman sprawled
along his window-lounge and woke him to the disgust of another
morning. He had to reach up and draw a curtain between his eyes
and the hateful sun.
But Kedzie had only her vigilant arm. It slipped down across her
brow like a watchful nurse coming in on tiptoe to protect a fretful
patient from broken sleep.
Kedzie slept on and on, till at length the section of Crotona Park
immediately beneath her refused to adapt itself longer to her
squirming search for soft spots. She sat up in startled confusion
at the unfamiliar ceiling. The wall-paper was not at all what she
always woke to. At first she guessed that she must have fallen out
of bed with a vengeance. Then she decided she had fallen out of doors
and windows as well, and into the front yard.
No, these bushes were not those bushes. That beech almost overhead,
seen from below by sleep-thick eyes, was an amazing thing.
She had drowsy childhood memories of being carried up-stairs by her
father and put to bed by her mother.
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