"All right."

Charles Stuart looked equally radiant, and they swung back and forth
smiling at each other over the top of the gate. Elizabeth began to
think it would not be such a bad bargain after all. If Charles Stuart
was really going to like her, how much happier life would be! For, of
course, he would never plot with John to run away from her any more,
and they three would play one perpetual game of ball for ever and ever.

They had swung some moments in happy silence when Charles Stuart, with
masculine obtuseness, made a blunder that shattered the airy fabric of
their dream. He had been looking down into Elizabeth's deep eyes, and
exclaimed in honest surprise:

"Say, Lizzie, your eyes are green, I do declare!"

Elizabeth's face turned crimson. To accuse her of having black eyes,
as many people did by lamplight, was horrid, horrid mean; to say her
eyes were gray was a deadly insult. But to be told they were green!
She had only a minute before delicately spared Charles Stuart's
feelings, and now he had turned and trampled upon her most tender
sensibilities.

"They're not! They're not!" she cried indignantly. "They're blue, and
I won't play with you ever again, Charles Stuart MacAllister, you
nasty, nasty boy!"

She flung down off the gate and swept up her treasures from the wet
grass. The sight of her roused all Charles Stuart's desire to tease.
She really looked so funny snatching up a shoe or stocking and dropping
it again in her wrath, while Trip grabbed everything she dropped and
shook it madly. Charles Stuart jumped from the gate and began
imitating her, catching up a stone, letting it fall, with a shriek and
crying loudly at the top of his voice, while Trip, enjoying the noise
and commotion, went round and round after his tail just because he
could think of nothing else to do.

This was too much for Elizabeth. Charles Stuart was heaping insult
upon insult. She got the last article of her bundle crushed into her
pinafore, and as the boy, going through the same motions, raised his
head, she gave him a sounding slap in the face, turned, darted through
the gate, and went raging down the lane, dropping a shoe, a stocking,
an apple, or a piece of maple sugar at every bound. She was blinded
with tears and choking with grief and anger--anger that Charles Stuart
should have cajoled her into thinking he intended to be nice to her,
and grief that she could have been so cruel. Oh, what a terrible blo