ou are
asleep."

_Now_ what should he say? With any ordinary girl he could have found
the answer, but this one had him floored.

"But you look ever so much nicer when you are awake," she further
informed him, with a clear-eyed straightforwardness that was worse than
disconcerting. In desperation he answered, with her own frankness, that
she was nice looking herself. He meant it, too.

"I'm so glad you think so," she contentedly sighed. "I just knew we
should like each other as soon as I saw you lying there asleep."

It was he who blushed, not the girl.

She partly raised up to recapture her hazel branch, and when she sat
down again her shoulder remained lightly touching his arm. An electric
thrill ran through him and tingled out at his fingertips, but he never
moved a muscle. She looked up at him in peaceful happiness and he
somehow felt very mean and unworthy. Her eyes made him uncomfortable.
The whole trouble was that she was so honest--had never been taught to
conceal her thoughts by the thousand and one spoken and unspoken lies of
ordinary social intercourse. She was neither timid nor bold, but merely
natural, with never a suspicion that conventionality demanded a man and
a maid to leave a mutual liking unconfessed. It was rather rough on the
young man. He was not used to having the truth fly around in such
reckless fashion in his conversations with girls, and it bothered him.

"I'm not a bit afraid of you," she presently told him. "I knew all the
time that Aunt Mattie was wrong. She told me that all men were dreadful,
and that the first thing they did was to--to kiss a girl they liked."

"She knows nothing about it," he replied rather crossly. For some
unaccountable reason he was angry with himself and with her.

"Indeed, she doesn't," she agreed, eying him thoughtfully. Presently she
added: "I do not believe, though, that I should have minded it so much
if she had been right."

Shade of Plato! He looked down at the tempting curve of her red lips.
They were round and full and soft as the petals of a half-blown rosebud,
warm and tender and sweet, with just the least trace of puckering to
indicate how they could meet the pressure of other lips. He felt his
heart come pounding up into the region of his Adam's apple, and he
trembled as he had not done since his first attack of puppy love at the
age of fourteen. His breath came and went with a painful flutter but he
made no movement. If it had been any sort of