pass for her name, looking at her with an
admiration purposely open in the hope of distracting her attention,
but the ruse was of no avail. She only smiled into his face with
impish delight.

"You people from the East are so dreadfully disingenuous," she
complained. "Why not confess frankly that, so far as you are
concerned, I belong to the 'no name' series?"

Her eyes were dancing, and suddenly Van Mater felt as if he had known
her always--eons before he had known himself in his present
incarnation.

"To think that I shouldn't have recognized you in the pink gown," he
murmured, with well-feigned surprise. "And to think that I'm no more
surprised than I am to have you suddenly bob up here in the wet, after
your wanderings of perhaps a hundred lifetimes! I can't seem to recall
the date and planet upon which we last met," he continued,
apologetically, "but I fancy that we picked mushrooms in those old
times--that the earth and air were all sopping, just as they are now."

"You write books--you know you do!"

"Well--it's a decent enough occupation!"

"Yes," uncertainly. "Still, writers aren't usually very sincere; they
don't mean what they say. They spin copy as a spider does a web!"

"Writers not sincere--don't mean what they say!" he echoed. "Why, my
dear young lady, you're all wrong. They usually mean so much that they
can't begin to say it--and as for sincerity, they're the sincerest
people in the world!"

"That is, while it lasts!" he added to himself, but his listener, who
had stooped to the ground and was now holding up a particularly large
and luscious mushroom, was all unconscious of his reservation.

"Look out! You're stepping on them!" she cried, excitedly, and for the
next ten minutes they wandered about with eyes bent on the earth in
fascinated absorption. Van Mater at last straightened up with such a
thrill of satisfaction as he had not experienced since boyhood.

"My pail's full," he called, seating himself on one of the projecting
bowlders. "So come and show me where to pick the beefsteaks."

She pointed upward. Where the hill humped itself against the sky the
blurred figure of a cow was visible. Van Mater tried again.

"You might come and rest," he coaxed, pointing to another bowlder that
cropped out in friendly nearness to his own. With a last lingering
scrutiny of the ground about, she came, seating herself beside him.
Then, with her chin resting on her hands, she surveyed him with a sort