Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 81: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

down from the window. They said later she had screamed. at the top of her voice, or else she would have gone over without anyone noticing. patter that Dr. Clegg took her away to the hospital where there were no high windows and they came in to see her all night long. The dreams stopped. When at last she was well enough to go i home, she found that the window was gone, too. Aunt May and Uncie Roscoe had boarded it up, because she was a somnambulist. She didn’t know what a somnambulist was, but guessed it had something to do with her being sick and the dreams not coming any more. For the dreams stopped, then. There was no way of making them come back, and she really didn’t want them any more. It was fun to play outside with Marvin Mason now, and she went back to school when the new semester began. Now, without the window to look at, she just slept at night. Ane May and Uncle Roscoe were glad, and Dr. Clegg said she was turning out to be a mighty fine little specimen. Avis could remember it all. now as though it were yesterday. Or today. Or tomorrow. How she grew up. How Marvin Mason fell in love with her. How she went to college and they became engaged. How she felt the night Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe were killed in the crash at Leedsville. That was a bad time. An even worse time was when Marvin Mason had gone away. He was in service now, overseas. She had stayed on all alone in the house, for it was her house now. | Reba came in days to do the housework, and Dr. Clegg dropped aieund even after she turned 21 and officially inherited her estate. He didn’t seem to approve of her present mode of living. He asked her several times why she didn’t shut up the house and move into a small - apartment downtown. He was concerned because she showed no desire to keep up the friendships she had made in college; Avis was curiously reminded of the solicitude he had exhibited during her childhood. But Avis was no longer a child. She proved that by removing ae had always seemed to her a symbol of adult domination; she had the high round window in her room unboarded once more. It was a silly gesture. She knew it at the time, but somehow it held a curious significance for her. For one thing it re-established a linkage with her childhood, and more and more childhood came to epitomize happiness for her. With Marvin Mason gone, and Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe dead, there was little enough to fill the present. Avis wouid sit up in her bedroom and pore over the scrapbooks she had so assiduously pasted up as a girl. She had kept her dolls and the old fairy tale books; she HES drowsy afternoons examining them. It was almost- ‘possible to lose one’s time-sense in such jected Fer sur- ee comichbooks