“A bridge, is it? Well, perhaps,” agreed Sybil, smiling at the recruit. “Well, you can say the law through as well as any one of us, I think. But being word perfect, you know, is just the very beginning. Now let me see the reef-line knot. And you have been doing some gardening, I know.” “Oh, Sybil,” Betty remembered suddenly, “may Guides believe in fairies?” Sybil thought they certainly might, and that many of them did, after screwing up her brows a little to deliberate. She listened, too, to the tale of the fairy music in much more sympathetic a manner than had Rene and Mona. “I have never heard it,” she said, “but I should not like to say you made a mistake. Besides, you say that Gerry heard it too?” “Once, when she came up suddenly,” said Betty, with eyes glistening. “But till then I’d always been alone, you know.” “Well, next time I am gardening alone I shall listen for it too,” said the head of the patrol soberly. “But even if you should find out that it is not fairies who make it, that need not disappoint you, need it? Tell me if you hear it again, though.” Sybil stopped short and coloured a little before she went on. “Some things,” she said (shyly, Betty thought, if a head girl _could_ feel shy), “are loveliest somehow if one keeps them secret. Like fairy music, perhaps, and--oh, other things that sometimes happen when one is alone. It somehow takes the bloom off the loveliness to talk about them.” Sybil stopped. “Miss Carey said something like that in the Oak Room last year,” said Sybil; “but I am afraid I have not made it plain enough for you to understand.” Betty retreated into the garden feeling more anxious than ever, however, that the “Piper of Dreams” should play. The rest of the girls were at sketching class, away at the other end of the grounds under the charge of the art mistress; she herself was free for one of her quiet hours. She was still thinking of what Sybil had said as she made her way to the Daisy plot and up beyond it to the fence which divided the gardens from the school wood, and stood there, leaning over and listening. “Just in case----” There was no sound; but suddenly her eyes fell on something bright lying at her feet, and she bent down. A peacock’s feather lay there. It seemed to have been pushed through an opening in the fence, and lay on the blade of the spade which she had left there that afternoon. “I believe it’s a present to _me_!” said Betty, staring. CHAPTER VIII IN WITCH’S WOOD She stood perfectly still and gazed at the feather for a moment. Then she leaned over the fence to see if there was anything else to be seen.