, are yer mad with me?"

To Champney's delight, he heard an added note of anxiety. He bowed his
head lower over the banjo case and in silence renewed his simulated
struggle to slip that instrument into it.

"Champney! Are yer _rale_ mad with me?" There was no mistaking the
earnestness of this appeal. He made no answer, but chuckled inwardly at
the audacity of the address.

"Champ!" she stamped her foot to emphasize her demand; "if yer don't
tell me yer ain't mad with me, I'll lave yer for good and all--so now!"

"I don't know that I'm mad with you," he spoke at last in an aggrieved,
a subdued tone; "I simply didn't think you could play me such a mean
trick when I was in earnest, dead earnest."

"Did yer mane it?"

"Why, of course I did! You don't suppose a man walks three miles in a
hot night to serenade a girl just to get an ounce of pepper in his nose
by way of thanks, do you?"

"I thought yer didn't mane it; Romanzo said yer was laughing at me for
telling yer 'bout the lords and ladies a-making love with their
guitars." The voice indicated some dejection of spirits.

"He did, did he! I'll settle with Romanzo later." He heard a soft
brushing of branches in the region of the Norway spruces and knew that
the youth was in retreat. "And I'll settle it with you, too, Miss Aileen
Armagh-and-don't-you-forget-it, in a way that'll make you remember the
tag end of your name for one while!"

This threat evidently had its effect.

"Wot yer going to do?"

He heard her draw her breath sharply.

"Come down here and I'll tell you."

"I can't. She might catch me. She told me I'd got to stay in my room
after eight, and she's coming home ter-night. Wot yer going to do?"

Champney laughed outright. "Don't you wish you might know, Aileen
Armagh!" He took his banjo in one hand, lifted his cap with the other
and, standing so, bareheaded in the moonlight, sang with all the
simulated passion and pathos of which he was capable one of the few love
songs that belong to the world, "Kathleen Mavoureen"; but he took pains
to substitute "Aileen" for "Kathleen." Even Ann and Hannah, listening
from the kitchen porch, began to feel sentimentally inclined when the
clear voice rendered with tender pathos the last lines:

"Oh! why art thou silent, thou voice of my heart?
Oh! why art thou silent, Aileen Mavoureen?"

Without so much as another glance at the little figure in the window, he
ran across the lawn and up the lane to th