most unlike him.

"My goodness! What ever in the world's wrong with you?"

Everything, he answered, gloomily, was wrong.

"What an idea!" said Winny.

It _was_ an idea, he said, if it was nothing else. At any rate, it was
his idea. And Winny wanted to know what made him have it.

"Oh, I dunno. There are things a fellow wants he hasn't got."

"What sort of things?"

"All sorts."

"Well--don't think about them. Think," said Winny, "of the things you
_have_ got."

"What things?"

"Why," said Winny, counting them off on her fingers, "you've got a
father--and a mother--and new tires to your bike. Good boots" (she had
stuck buttercups in their laces) "and a most beautiful purple tie." (She
held another buttercup under his chin.)

"It _is_ a tidy tie," Ranny admitted, smiling because of the buttercups.
"But me hat's a bit rocky."

"Quite a good hat," said Winny, looking at it with her little head on
one side. "And you've won the silver cup for the Wandsworth Hurdle Race.
What more do you want?"

"It's what a fellow hasn't got he wants."

"Well, what haven't you got, then?"

"Prospects," said Ranny. "I've no prospects. Not for years and years."

"No," said Winny, with decision. "And didn't ought to have. Not at your
age."

She had no sympathy for him and no understanding of his case.

Ranny sat up, stared about him, and sighed profoundly.

And because he could think of nothing else to say he suggested that it
was time to go.

Winny sprang to her feet with a swiftness that implied that if it was to
go he wanted, she was more than ready to oblige him. As she mounted her
bicycle, the shut firmness of her mouth, the straightness of her back,
and the grip of her little hands on the handle bars were eloquent of her
determination to be gone. And her face, he noticed, was pinker than he
ever remembered having seen it.

And he wondered what it was he had said.

CHAPTER VII

It was after that evening that he observed a change in her, a change
that he could neither account for nor define. It seemed to him that she
was trying to avoid him, and that he was no longer agreeably affected by
her behavior, as he had been in the beginning by her fugitive, evasive
ways. Then she had, indeed, led him a dance, but he had thoroughly
enjoyed the fun of it. Now the dancing and the fun were all over. At
least, so he was left to gather from her manner; for the strangeness of
it was that she said nothing now. There w