"Madeliene E Robins - Somewhere In Dreamland Tonight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robins Madeleine E)

"Rose-pink lady," he murmured again.

Ruth didn't move, except to tilt her face up to his.

Leda was waiting for her at the Beacon Tower.

"Where've you been?" she fluttered. "Jo and Pearlie are looking for you
everywhere, we thought you were lost. Ruthie, you all right?"

Ruth smiled and nodded and said she'd just lost them in the crowd. "Did you see
the midgets?" she asked.

Leda shook her head. They had been searching for Ruth. Jonah was fit to be tied.

"We'll have to come out again," Ruth said softly. "There is so much to see yet."

Then Jonah and Pearline found them. Ruth endured their scolding all the way to
the train station, and until they boarded the car back to Flatbush Avenue. She
slept on the trip back, stumbled into Aunt Min's flat, got herself to bed
somehow. Already she was thinking of next Saturday.

THE NEXT time it was all familiar: the parks, the paths that connected from one
to the other. The excitement that traced pathways along the nerves when you
first stood there at dusk surrounded by the lights and the smells and the sounds
and the tastes and the people. When they reached Dreamland Jonah took Pearline
and Leda off to the midget city and they agreed to meet at the tower at nine.
Ruth had told them she was meeting a friend from her church choir. Jonah may
have believed her; Pearline and Leda winked broadly and took him away before he
could ask too many questions. Helping Ruth, each girl borrowed a little of her
adventure, thrilled to their own illicit part in her drama.

From the gates of the park it took Ruth only a few minutes to find the Congress
of Wonders. By the curtains at the back of the platform she saw him, dark and
polished. His smile gleamed in the dusk, and Ruth's pulse began a slow, dramatic
hammering. He knew she had come to find him, she knew he knew. Everything would
move forward now from that knowledge.

He took her elbow and guided her forward, smiling solicitously.

"I don't know your name," she heard herself say. His eyes were very dark.

"Adam," he said quietly.

This time he did not take her to the backstage of Hellgate. Instead they walked
a thread through canvas tunnels, alleys, under the boardwalk and out onto the
beach. The ocean, overshadowed by the parks, glistened in the moonlight. He held
Ruth's fingers in his own cool, dry hand. After a while they took their shoes
and socks off and walked with the sand between their toes. They talked, then
were silent.