ce her mask of hard
boldness and was just a simple, humble, rather pathetic little girl,
voicing secret aspirations toward a fineness life had denied her.

"I say, Madeline," Ted went on. "You don't--meet other chaps the way you
met me to-day, do you?" Set the blind to lead the blind! If there was
anything absurd in scapegrace Ted's turning mentor he was unconscious of
the absurdity, was exceedingly in earnest.

"What's that to you?" She snapped the mask back into place.

"Nothing--that is--I wouldn't--that's all."

She laughed shrilly.

"You're a pretty one to talk," she scoffed.

Ted flushed.

"I know I am. See here, Madeline. You're dead right. I ought not to
have taken you out last night. I ought not to have let you meet me
here to-day."

"I made you--I made you do both those things."

Ted shook his head at that.

"A man's to blame always," he asserted.

"No, he isn't," denied Madeline. "A girl's to blame always."

They stared at each other a moment while the brook tinkled through the
silence. Then they both laughed at the solemnity of their contradictions.

"But there isn't a bit of harm done," went on Madeline. "You see, I knew
that first night on the train that you were a gentleman."

"Some gentlemen are rotters," said Ted Holiday, with a wisdom beyond his
twenty years.

"But you are not."

"No, I'm not; but some other chap might be. That is why I wish you would
promise not to go in for this sort of thing."

"With anybody but you," she stipulated.

"Not with anybody at all," corrected Ted soberly, remembering his own
recent restrained impulse to put his arm around her.

"Well, I don't want to--at least not with anybody but you. I never did it
before with anybody. Honest, Ted, I never did."

"That's good. I felt sure that you hadn't."

"Why?"

He grinned sheepishly and stooped to break off a dry twig from a
nearby bush.

"By the way you didn't let me kiss you," he admitted. "A fellow likes
that in a girl. Did you know it?" He tossed away the twig and looked back
at the girl as he asked the question.

"I thought they liked--the other thing."

"They do and they don't," said Ted, his paradox again betraying a
scarcely to be expected wisdom. "But that is neither here nor there. What
I started out to say was that I'm glad you don't make a practice of this
pick-up business. It--it's no good," he summed up.

"I know." Madeline nodded understanding of the import of his warning. She
was f