Their friendship thickened until he distinguished himself by climbing up the pillar of a side veranda to call "good-morning" through the window to her while she was still in bed; and she, at dinner, refused to eat stewed corn, a dish of which she was ravenously fond, because he had told her that it had once made him ill. She was a most unusual young lady, especially in affairs of the heart: she was impulsively positive in her likes and her dislikes, and she expressed either always unreservedly. She treated Don's elder cousin, Conroy, with a coldness which the boy demanded an explanation of: and she explained simply, "I don't like your face." She crossed the veranda to a visitor—to whom she had not been introduced—and sat herself on his knee, smiling the frankest admiration; and when she was asked to excuse her abruptness, she replied, "He's nice." She flattered Don with an adoration that went to his head.
She had already given him a handkerchief worked with her monogram in pale blue silk—for his sticky fingers, though she did not say so—and she came one afternoon to their playroom in the broken "summer-house" with a photograph of herself in her winter furs. He was busy making preparations for the burial of a lead hero who had been killed in the wars. He accepted the picture with a brief condescension, and directed her to line up, in funeral procession, the wooden animals from his Noah's ark. She obeyed him silently, but not with her usual enthusiasm; and when the last strain of martial music had died away,
