"
"Like a grandfather? How young I was then! How time changes us!"
"I'm afraid my conversation did not make a great impression upon you," she
continued.
"But it did. I am remembering very fast. If you will wait a moment, I will
tell you some of the things you said."
The girl laughed merrily. Whenever she laughed he realized that it was
becoming terribly difficult not to tell her how adorable she was. "I
wouldn't risk it, if I were you," she warned him, "because I didn't speak
to you at all. I shut my lips tight and trembled all over every bit of the
time I was dancing with you. I did not sleep that night, because I was so
unhappy, wondering what the Great Harkless would think of me. I knew he
thought me unutterably stupid because I couldn't talk to him. I wanted to
send him word that I knew I had bored him. I couldn't bear for him not to
know that I knew I had. But he was not thinking of me in any way. He had
gone to sea again in a big boat, the ungrateful pirate, cruising with Mrs.
Van Skuyt."
"How time _does_ change us!" said John. "You are wrong, though; I did
think of you; I have al----"
"Yes," she interrupted, tossing her head in airy travesty of the stage
coquette, "you think so--I mean you say so--now. Away with you and your
blarneying!"
And so they went through the warm noontide, and little he cared for the
heat that wilted the fat mullein leaves and made the barefoot boy, who
passed by, skip gingerly through the burning dust with anguished mouth and
watery eye.
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