ery well, do you?" Amy asked, curiously. "I mean, he
isn't related to you."

Kit shook her head with bland indifference.

"He's a friend of Billie's. I only met him down east when he came to chase
the gypsy moth in Gilead."

She did not add that with Shad's help and able cooperation, she had
managed to curtail the chase of the gypsy moth, temporarily, by holding
the chaser captive in the family corn-crib, but she inwardly suspected
that Stanley was remembering it. Every once in a while she accidentally
caught him looking at her, with a look of amused, interested retrospection
that made her vaguely uncomfortable.

As they left the campus, Norma, leading with Billie, took the street that
led to the bluffs overlooking the lake, and somehow or other in the
subsequent scramble down the narrow pathways, Kit found Stanley at her
elbow. Even Jean could not have been more dignified or distant in her
manner, but Stanley refused to be frozen out.

"You know," he said, genially, "I've just found out something, Miss Kit. I
forgave you long ago for locking me up in your corn-crib, and nearly
landing me in the local calaboose, but you don't forgive me one bit for
trespassing in your berry patch."

Kit's profile tilted ever so slightly heavenward. Jean had loved to quote
to her in the old days that consistency was a jewel, and William of Avon
had said so positively, whereupon Kit would swing always, feeling herself
backed by Emerson's opinion that "consistency was a hobgoblin of little
minds." Yet now she felt herself feeling almost righteously consistent.
She had thoroughly made up her mind that very day when Mr. Hicks made his
memorable and fruitless journey to Greenacres that not even government
experts had any right to climb over fences into people's private property
without first asking permission. Perhaps the sudden popularity of the
trespasser with all the other members of the family had something to do
with Kit's stand against him. Even Helen had remarked that she didn't see
how on earth Kit could ever have imagined a person looking like Mr. Howard
could be a berry hooker.

"I don't want you to forgive me," she said, calmly. "I've never been one
bit sorry for it. I think you ought to have come up to the house and asked
permission to go in there. And you never said that you were sorry. It
always seemed to me as if you rather acted as if you thought it was a good
joke"--she hesitated a moment, before adding pointedly,--"on