see how far she
might trust his recovered inscrutability. "Why don't you show some
human inquisitiveness about my being here?" she asked irrelevantly,
just as Ward was hastily choosing how he would answer her without
saying too much.

"It wouldn't be polite to be inquisitive about a lady, would it?" Ward
retorted, thankful for the change of subject.

"N-no--but, then, you never bother about being just polite! Charlie
Fox would--"

"Charlie Fox would think you came to see him," Ward asserted
uncharitably. "My head isn't swelled to that extent. Why did you
come, anyway?"

"To see you." Billy Louise lost her nerve when she saw the light leap
into his eyes. "To see whether you were dead or not," she revised
hastily, "so mommie would stop worrying about you. Mommie has pestered
the life out of me for the last month, thinking you might be sick or
hurt or something. So--I was riding up this way, anyway, and--"

"I see I'll have to ride down and prove to mommie that I'm very much
alive. I'm sure glad to know that somebody takes an interest in me--as
if I were a real human." Ward's eyes watched furtively her face, but
Billy Louise refused even to nibble at the bait.

"Why didn't you come before, then? You know mommie likes to have you."

"How about mommie's child?" Ward's look was dangerous to his good
resolutions.

"Listen here, Ward." Billy Louise took refuge behind her terrible
frankness. "If you make love, I won't like you half as well. Don't
you know that all the time when I used to play with my pretend Ward
Warren, he--he never made love?" A dimple tried to show itself in her
cheek and was sent about its business with a twist of her lips. "My
pretend Ward was lovely; he liked me to pieces, but he never came right
out and said so. He--he skated around the subject--" Billy Louise
illustrated the skating process by drawing her forefinger in a wide
circle around her cup. "He made love--with his eyes--and he kissed me
with his--voice--but he never spoiled it with words."

Ward grunted a word that sounded like "damchump."

"Nothing of the kind!" Billy Louise flew to the defense of her
"pretend." "He knew just exactly how a girl likes to be made love to.
And, anyway, you've been doing the selfsame thing yourself, Ward
Warren, till just now. And--"

"Oh, have I?"

"Yes, you have. And I might have known better than to--to startle you.
You always, eternally, do something nobody'd ever dream o