glad, and in a manner scared at
the thrill her newly discovered beauty gives me, and keeping up my
dignity and coherence with an effort. My attention is constantly being
distracted to note how prettily she moves, to wonder why it is I never
noticed the sweet fall, the faint delightful whisper of a lisp in her
voice before.

We agree about the flowers and the sunshine and the Canadian
winter--about everything. "I think so often of those games we used to
invent," she declares. "So do I," I say, "so do I." And then with a
sudden boldness: "Once I broke a stick of yours, a rotten stick you
thought a sound one. Do you remember?"

Then we laugh together and seem to approach across a painful,
unnecessary distance that has separated us. It vanishes for ever. "I
couldn't now," she says, "smack your face like that, Stephen."

That seems to me a brilliantly daring and delightful thing for her to
say, and jolly of her to use my Christian name too! "I believe I
scratched," she adds.

"You never scratched," I assert with warm conviction. "Never."

"I did," she insists and I deny. "You couldn't."

"We're growing up," she cries. "That's what has happened to us. We shall
never fight again with our hands and feet, never--until death do us
part."

"For better, or worse," I say, with a sense of wit and enterprise beyond
all human precedent.

"For richer, or poorer," she cries, taking up my challenge with a
lifting laugh in her voice.

And then to make it all nothing again, she exclaims at the white lilies
that rise against masses of sweet bay along the further wall....

How plainly I can recall it all! How plainly and how brightly! As we
came up the broad steps at the further end towards the tennis lawn, she
turned suddenly upon me and with a novel assurance of command told me to
stand still. "_There_," she said with a hand out and seemed to survey me
with her chin up and her white neck at the level of my eyes. "Yes. A
whole step," she estimated, "and more, taller than I. You will look down
on me, Stephen, now, for all the rest of our days."

"I shall always stand," I answered, "a step or so below you."

"No," she said, "come up to the level. A girl should be smaller than a
man. You are a man, Stephen--almost.... You must be near six feet....
Here's Guy with the box of balls."

She flitted about the tennis court before me, playing with Philip
against Guy and myself. She punished some opening condescensions with a
wicked vi