ry of every sort of emotion. "And--Edith?"

I looked at her then, fast enough. "Edith?" I stared at her stupidly.
"What the--what's Edith got to do with it?"

"Possibly nothing"--in the same squeezed tone. "Men are
so--er--irresponsible; and you say you don't always mean--Still, when a
man writes pages and _pages_ to a girl every week for nearly a year, one
naturally supposes--"

"Oh, look here!" I was getting desperate enough to be a bit rough with
her. "Edith doesn't care a rap about me, and you know it. And she knows
I don't care, and--and if anybody had anything to say, it would be your Mr.
Terence Weaver."

"_My_ Mr. Terence Weaver?" She was looking down at me sidewise, in a
perfectly maddening way. "You are really very--er--funny, Mr. Carleton."

"Well," I rapped out between my teeth, "I don't _feel_ funny. I feel--"

"No? But, really, you know, you act that way."

I saw she was getting all the best of it--and, in my opinion, that would
kill what little chance a man might have with a girl. I set deliberately
about breaking through that crust of composure, if I did nothing more.

"That depends on the view-point," I grinned. "Would you think it funny if
I carried you off--really, you know--and--er--married you and made you
live happy--"

"You seem to insist upon the happy part of it, which is not at all--"

"Necessary?" I hinted.

"Plausible," she supplied sweetly.

"But would you think it funny, if I did?"

She regarded her broken pencil ruefully--or pretended to--and pinched her
brows together in deep meditation. Oh, she was the most maddening bit of
young womanhood--But, there, no Barney for me.

"I--might," she decided at last. "It _would_ be rather droll, you know,
and I wonder how you'd manage it; I'm not very tiny, and I rather think it
wouldn't be easy to--er--carry me off. Would you wear a mask--a black
velvet mask? I should insist upon black velvet. And would you say:
'Gadzooks, madam! I command you not to scream!' Would you?" She leaned
toward me, and her eyes--well, for downright torture, women are at times
perfectly fiendish.

I caught her hand, and I held it, too, in spite of her. That far I was
master.

"No," I told her grimly. "If I saw that you were going to do anything so
foolish as to scream, I should just kiss you, and--kiss you till you were
glad to be sensible about it."

Well, she tried first to look calmly amused; then she tried to look
insulted, and to freeze me into san