ve been scornfully thrust in among the cobwebs with other
promiscuous rummage of outgrown days. I might have been hardly more
important than the dolls that preceded me in your affections by only a
couple of years. How could I tell?" He paused and questioned her with
direct eyes. "No, I meant to come back into your life not as a ghost
speaking from the past but as a man intent on announcing himself in
person. It was no part of my scheme that you should say, 'Oh, yes, I
remember him. A long, thin kid with a vile temper. I used to love to
stir him up and hear him roar.' That's why I never wrote."

Her smile was still a little doubtful and so he went on.

"It would have been too easy for you to have simply dropped me cold. Now
it happens that in life I am endowed with a certain india-rubber
quality. I am practically indestructible. When you biff me into the
corner I can come bouncing back for more. In short, I am not so easy to
be rid of, when I'm on the ground."

Conscience laughed. They were still young enough to respond thrillingly
to the remembered fragrance of honeysuckle and the plaintive note of the
whippoorwill, and perhaps to other memories, as well.

She rose abruptly and went down to the water's edge where she stood with
the breeze whipping the silk draperies of her blue bathing skirt against
her knees and stirring her hair into a dark nimbus about her head. After
retrieving from the sand the blue cap and the blue stocking, her
companion followed her.

"Now that I'm here," he asseverated, "I hold that we stand just where we
stood when we parted."

But at that she shook her head and laughed at him. "Quite the reverse,"
she declared. "I hold that by years of penitence I've lived down my
past. We're simply two young persons who once knew each other."

"Very well," acceded he. "It will come to the same thing in the end. We
will start as strangers, but I have a strong conviction that when we
become acquainted, I'm going to dog your steps to the altar. I'm willing
to cancel all the previous chapter, except that I sha'n't forget it....
Can _you_ forget it?"

She flushed, but shook her head frankly, and answered without evasion,
"I haven't forgotten it yet."

He was gazing into her face with such a hypnotism of undisguised
admiration that she smilingly inquired, "Well, have I changed much?"

"You have. You've changed much and radiantly. Since you insist on
regarding me as a new acquaintance I must be conservat