She floundered in a pool deep enough to drown even an adult, so manifestly helpless that Wesley plunged instantly to her rescue without arguing his own inability to swim. He had a briefest glimpse of hair floating like a small silver cloud about a frightened elfin face with enormous lilac eyes; then the icy pool received him and he was splashing mightily to keep his own head above water. Momentum took him near enough for the child to grasp his sleeve. The rest, the immemorial emergency of learning to swim the hard way, was up to Wesley. He made it, not because he was capable of meeting such a challenge at a moment's notice but because the bank and safety were after all only a few feet away. His frantic paddlings brought the two of them out, to lie panting and dripping side by side in the welcome heat of sunlight. When he had recovered enough to sit up, Wesley examined his find with more amazement than satisfaction. * * * * * The child was smaller than any child could be, he thought, and turned out with a fragile perfection more doll-like than human. Her hair was drying rapidly to look more like spun platinum than like silver; her dress, a mothlike wisp that changed color with mother-of-pearl iridescence, seemed not to have been wet at all. There was a belt of slender metal links about her tiny waist, caught with a flattened oval buckle the size of a pocket watch. Her lilac eyes, more blue than purple now with the shock gone out of them, looked up at him wonderingly. "Are you hurt?" Wesley asked. The child winced from the sound and he lowered his voice, feeling like an ogre before such fragility. "Can you talk yet?" He reached out to help her and she caught his thumb with both tiny hands and stood knee-deep in grass that barely covered his own ankles. Her voice was as high and clear as a sleigh-bell. "Clellingherif," she said, as if that unintelligibility settled everything. Wesley considered her unhappily. It was not Adventure yet; he saw only that he was saddled with a lost child who looked like a pixie and who talked like a bird, and that he would very probably lose the rest of his afternoon getting her off his hands. He tried again. "Where do you live?" It was so unlikely that her parents might have moved to Sampson City, with its insular aloofness and its once-a-day train, that he dismissed the idea at once. Second thought heartened him briefly. "Are your parents staying at the inn?" The "inn" was a rambling, seedily genteel resort catering mainly to retired couples and trout fishermen. He owned a half interest in it and lived there with his Aunt Jessica, who owned the other half and controlled both, and Miriam Harrell, who taught sixth grade at the Sampson County school and nursed a determination to become Mrs. Wesley Filburn. If the child's parents were new guests of his Aunt Jessica's, his problem was solved already.