No squawking pelicans screeched like steam-whistles into her splitting eardrums. No interminable flights of sea gulls dragged their sharp-feathered wingpoints across her naked eyeballs. On the slime and stench of a dead shark's body her little foot had forever stopped slipping. "Why--why, how--perfectly extraordinary!" woke Daphne. It seemed to be a pretty room. A little too neat, perhaps, a little too impersonal, to be one's very own. But by no means as plushily impersonal as a hotel, and by no means as poison-neat as a hospital. [225] "Wherever--in--the world--am I?" puzzled Daphne. Very cautiously, very experimentally, she began to investigate her most immediate surroundings. "I am at least in a very pretty--pale blue--wadded silk wrapper," she discovered with eminent satisfaction. "Also, on an astonishingly comfortable couch with at least a hundred pillows. . . . Oh--I hope the bow on my pigtail matches my pale blue wrapper!" she quickened expectantly. But there was no pigtail. Shockingly to her uplifted hands her short-cropped head loomed round and crisp and fluffy as a great worsted ball. "Oh, dear--oh, dear--oh, dear!" she gasped. "If I am dead and born again--I am a boy!" Wilting down discouragedly into her "hundred pillows" one slender hand dropped weakly to the floor. "Life is very empty," she said. "Everything in life is very empty--everything." Along her sluggish spine a curious little thrill passed suddenly. "There is a nose in my hand!" she gasped. "A _lovin'_ nose! Creep-Mouse!" she cried out [226] desperately. "Is it--possible that it's your lovin' nose?" "Perfectly possible!" thudded Creep-Mouse's essentially practical tail. "Perfectly possible," swished and fawned the bashful little fur body. "This is certainly very extraordinary," struggled Daphne. "Instead of being anything that I thought it was, it is quite evidently some sort of a bewitchment. I am a boy! But Creep-Mouse is still Creep-Mouse! I who went to sleep _real_ have waked up in a Fairy Story! But _what_ Fairy Story?" she shivered. "And _what_ page?" Quite inadvertently her eyes strayed to the little white table at the head of her couch. In the middle of the table shone a silver bell. "It would be interesting," mused Daphne, "to ring that bell and see who comes! If it's the 'Hunch-Backed Pony'--then I'll know, of course, that I'm in the Russian Fairy book. And if it's Snow White--" very cautiously she struggled up from her pillows and reached for the silver bell. "But I must ring you very--little-y," she faltered in her weakness. "So that whatever comes will surely [227] be very little." Then with an impetuous wilfulness that surprised even herself she grabbed up the bell with both hands and rang it and rang it and _rang_ it! In the corridor somewhere a door slammed and footsteps came running--running! Her doorhandle turned! A portiere wrenched aside!