you can't not
like someb'dy you've never seen."

"_I_ can, I often do." The possibility had only just occurred to him. He
saw it as a distinction and made the most of it. "Course if you're going
to make a fuss----"

Tara's eyes opened wider still. "Oh, Roy, you _are_----! 'Tisn't me
that's making fusses."

Though Roy knew nothing as yet about woman and the last word, he
instinctively took refuge in the masculine dignity that spurns descent
to the dusty arena when it feels defeat in the air.

"Girls don't never fuss--do they?" he queried suavely. "Let's get on
with the Game and not bother about your Boy-of-ten."

"And a half," Tara insisted tactlessly, with her sweetest smile. But
when Roy chose to be impassive pin-pricks were thrown away on him.

"Where'd we stop?" he mused, ignoring her remark. "Oh--I know. The
Knight was going forth to quest the Elephant with golden tusks for the
High Tower Princess who wanted them in her crown. Why _do_ Princesses
always want what the knights can't find?"

Tara's feminine intuition leaped at a solution.

"I 'spec it's just to show off they are Princesses and to keep the
Knights from bothering round.--So away he went and the Princess climbed
up to her highest tower and waved her lily hand----"

In the same breath she, Tara, sprang to her feet and swung herself
astride a downward sweeping branch just above Roy's head. There she
perched like a slim blue flower, dangling her tan-stockinged legs and
shaking her hair at him like golden rain. She was in one of her impish
moods; reaction, perhaps,--though she knew it not--from the high tragedy
of that other Tara, her namesake, and the great greatest-possible
grandmother of her adored 'Aunt Lila.' Suddenly a fresh impulse seized
her. Clutching her bough, she leaned down and lightly ruffled his hair.

He started and looked reproachful. "Don't rumple me. I'm going."

"You needn't, if you don't want to," she cooed caressingly. "_I_'m going
to the tipmost top to see out over the world. And the Princess doesn't
care a bean about the Golden Tusks--truly."

"She's jolly pleased with the knight that finds them," said Roy with a
deeper wisdom than he knew. "And you can't be stopped off quests that
way. Come on, Prince."

At a bend in the mossy path, he looked back and she waved her lily hand.

* * * * *

To be alone in the deep of the wood in bluebell time was, for Roy, a
sensation by itself. In a mome