After the little boys had departed, Julian and Portia lingered on, lying on their backs in the warm grass and looking straight into the sky. "Not a cloud, not a bird, not a plane. Not a mosquito, even," Portia mused. "Just blue nothing. It makes you feel--I don't know--peaceful, I guess." "M-m-m," Julian murmured noncommittally. It made him feel sleepy. He lay with his eyes half closed, chewing on a grass stem. "Millions and trillions of miles of just blue nothing," Portia repeated dreamily. She liked that phrase. "There goes a June bug, though. And up, way up, now, there's a hawk. And even if you can't see them, think of all the other things there are up there: satellites in orbit, meteors and meteorites, suns, moons, planets, stars; millions and billions and trillions of those! It doesn't make me feel peaceful, brother, it makes me feel nervous! 'Blue nothing,' _nothing_!" "Honestly," was all Portia could think of to say to that. Now a tiny plane went purring across the sky, very high, very slow to eyes grown accustomed to the flight of jets. Portia lay thinking about the club. When they were through with the cleaning, and they almost were, they would decorate it with the things from the Villa Caprice: the painting of a starchily dressed young lady swinging on a crescent moon; the Tiffany glass lamp shade (they had no lamp in the club, but if they turned the shade upside down, it would look like a vase, and it was a beautiful thing: all the colors of the rainbow, melted). They also had been given the cast-iron pug-dog with which Mrs. Brace-Gideon had felled the burglar, and the procession of teakwood elephants, and many other treasures. When everything was in place, Portia would go out and pick a big bouquet of roses and iris, and that would be the finishing touch. The distant plane made a peaceful, soothing sound. Very, very soothing.... Portia sat up abruptly and looked at her cousin. "Jule, don't you _dare_ go to sleep!" She began to tickle him mercilessly. "Wake up, wake up; we haven't finished working yet! Wake up this minute, Julian Jarman Frog!" 9 _The Attic_ Fine weather can't last forever. One morning, about a week later, Julian woke to a steady sound of rain. "A good day to look for safes," he thought. He had spent the night at the Villa Caprice, as he would often do that summer. There were so many rooms in the house that there was also one for him. "You must consider it your very own," his aunt had said, and this he was glad to do without a moment's hesitation.