rsely.

"It is Swen Brodie?"

"Yes. But how do you know?"

"Oh, I know lots of things people don't think I know! All girls do.
Girls are rather knowing creatures; I wonder if you realize that?"

"I don't know much about girls," he smiled at her.

She pondered the matter for a dozen steps, swinging her hat at her side
and looking away across the housetops to the mountains. She did not know
any other man who would have said that in just that way. The words were
frank; all sincerity; that is, nothing lay behind them. Archie and
Teddy, any of her boy friends in town--they knew all about girls! Or
thought that they did. Mr. Gratton with his smooth way; he led her to
suppose that he had been giving girls a great deal of studious thought
for many years, and that only after this thorough investigation did he
feel in a position to declare herself to be the most wonderful of her
sex.

"Don't you like girls?" she asked. For once she wasn't "fishing"; she
wanted to know.

"Of course I do," he told her heartily. "As well as a man can--under the
circumstances."

"You mean not knowing them better?" When he nodded she looked up at him
again, hesitated, and then demanded: "You like me, don't you?"

As the question popped out she understood even more clearly than before
that Mark King was utterly different from her various "men friends." She
had never asked a man that before; she was not accustomed to employing
either that direct method or matter-of-fact tone. Just now there was no
hint of the coquette in her; she was just a very grave-eyed girl, as
serious in her _tete-a-tete_ with an interesting male as she could have
been were she sixty years old. And she was concerned with his answer;
already she knew that he had a way of being very direct and straight
from the shoulder.

"Of course I do," he said heartily, a little surprised by the abruptness
of the question and yet without hesitation. "Very much."

She flushed prettily; she, Gloria Gaynor, flushed up because Mark King
said in blunt, unvarnished fashion: "I like you very much." The grave
sobriety went out of her eyes; they shone happily. When they reached the
"funny little store" she was humming a snatch of a bright little waltz
tune. And she was thinking, without putting the thought into words: "And
I like you very much. You are quite the most splendid man I ever saw."

King laughed over Gloria's order. Some bars of sweetened chocolate, a
bag of cookies with stale fr