hat it was equal to his weight, then swung himself up into its
crotch. By standing with an arm about the main stem, he could reach the
bunches easily on either side. Sophy held out the lap of her skirt.

"You _are_ a nice playmate!" she called up to him, smiling.

He tossed down bunch after bunch from where he stood. Then, seating
himself sideways on one of the larger boughs, gathered all that were
within reach. His bare head, with its clustered, red-brown hair, looked
quite wonderful in the setting of golden leaves and iron-blue grapes.

"Forgive me...." said Sophy. "But I _must_ tell you.... You look like
the young Dionysus--with those bunches of grapes hanging all about you."

"Well, that's odd," said Loring; "but from here you look to me like
Ariadne." He thanked the gods that he had not forgotten all his
mythology. "I ask nothing better than to give you a crown of stars. I
believe that's what Dionysus gave Ariadne ... when she became his wife."

Sophy laughed.

"You dear boy," said she. "That was very quick of you. And I like you
for conquering your evil temper so nicely. You never had a sister, had
you?"

"Why! Are you thinking of offering to be a sister to me?"

"Not at all. I was only thinking that you wouldn't be so 'techess,' as
the darkies say, if you'd had a nice, blunt sister to tease you when you
were young--that is, younger than you are now," she ended cruelly.

Loring swung himself down beside her.

"The atrocious crime of being a young man!" he said, looking into her
eyes boldly and somewhat mockingly, in his turn. "It seems hard for you
to forgive me that."

Sophy was a trifle disconcerted.

"You are so easy to tease ... it's a temptation," she said rather
lamely.

Loring replied with apparent irrelevance.

"I believe the Brownings are the accepted standard of married bliss,
aren't they?"

"Why--yes--I believe they are," admitted Sophy.

"Very well. And do you happen to remember that Elizabeth Barrett was
some years older than Robert Browning!"

Sophy was annoyed to feel herself colouring.

"Yes, I know that," she said coldly.

Loring kept his eyes on her. She was eating the little fox flavoured
grapes as she walked beside him--very deliberately, one at a time.

"What I find so peculiarly interesting about it," continued Loring, his
voice shaken, his heart racing, "is that the difference in their ages
was even more than the difference in ours."

Sophy threw aside the bunch of