kin' for
you," he said.

"Why--why," she returned, suddenly fearful that something had happened
to Ben--"is anything wrong?"

He smiled. "Nothin' is wrong," he returned. "But I wanted to talk to
you, an' I expected to find you here."

There was a gentleness in his voice that she had not heard before, and
a quiet significance to his words that made her eyes droop away from
his with slight confusion. She replied without looking at him.

"But I came here to write," she said.

He gravely considered her, drawing one foot up on the rock and clasping
his hands about the knee. "I've thought a lot about that book," he
declared with a trace of embarrassment, "since you told me that you was
goin' to put real men an' women in it. I expect you've made them do
the things that you've wanted them to do an' made them say what you
wanted them to say. That part is right an' proper--there wouldn't be
any sense of anyone writin' a book unless they could put into it what
they thought was right. But what's been botherin' me is this; how can
you tell whether the things you've made them say is what they would
have said if they'd had any chance to talk? An' how can you tell what
their feelin's would be when you set them doin' somethin'?"

She laughed. "That is a prerogative which the writer assumes without
question," she returned. "The author of a novel makes his characters
think and act as the author himself imagines he would act in the same
circumstances."

He looked at her with amused eyes. "That's just what I was tryin' to
get at," he said. "You've put me into your book, an' you've made me do
an' say things out of your mind. But you don't know for sure whether I
would have done an' said things just like you've wrote them. Mebbe if
I would have had somethin' to say I wouldn't have done things your way
at all."

"I am sure you would," she returned positively.

"Well, now," he returned smiling, "you're speakin' as though you was
pretty certain about it. You must have wrote a whole lot of the story."

"It is two-thirds finished," she returned with a trace of satisfaction
in her voice which did not escape him.

"An' you've got all your characters doin' an' thinkin' things that you
think they ought to do?" His eyes gleamed craftily. "You got a man
an' a girl in it?"

"Of course."

"An' they're goin' to love one another?"

"No other outcome is popular with novel readers," she returned.

He rocked back and forth,