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drove it home—“I’m sure that no one there will be as glad to see you as I am sorry to have you go.”

Alison could not resist this.

“Do you know that’s the very first nice thing you’ve ever said to me, Tony?”

“Is it? That’s funny!”

“Do you really want me to stay so much?”

“Well, considering I’ve asked you three times to stay, I should think you’d know I wanted you to.”

Alison hardened her heart. “I’m very sorry. I’d like to stay, but I can’t. Good-bye for a while. Mary will bring you your tea, and I think you had better go in again—then she will give you an arm. Good-bye.”

She weakly paused in the doorway to add:

“You can see the front steps from where you are, you know. Look out when you hear me shut the door and I’ll wave you good-bye.”

She disappeared, in a turmoil. Tony lay and called himself hard names. He listened for the clang of the front door, and when it came, doggedly lay still, gazing in the opposite direction, and would not turn his head to see the promised waved farewell. But as soon as he judged that Alison was well on her way down the street, he dragged himself up to watch her till she was out of sight. Turning away sharply, he hurt his leg, and swore with disproportionate anger for fully two minutes, his vocabulary being as varied as his opportunities for acquiring it had been.

“I am a fool,” he told himself then—“a little fool. I wish she’d keep separate too. . . . It’s rather a good thing I’m not ten years older—(first time I’ve ever felt that!) Things might be—rather awkward. For this is play, I suppose. . . . If she was only a little older herself! I must try and remember I’m only fifteen—it’s hard to do that—I am more really. At fifteen English and American boys are at school, thinking of cricket and baseball and look-