"Oh, nothin'," she replied airily.
Herbert began to be mistrustful of the solid earth: somewhere there was
a fearful threat to his equipoise. "What you talkin' about?" he said
with an effort to speak scornfully; but his sensitive voice almost
failed him.
"Oh, nothin'," said Florence. "Just about what pretty eyes you know you
have, and Patty's being pretty, too, and so you're glad she thinks
yours are pretty, the way _you_ do--and everything!"
Herbert visibly gulped. He believed that Patty had betrayed him; had
betrayed the sworn confidence of "Truth!"
"That's all I was talkin' about," Florence added. "Just about how you
knew you had such pretty eyes. Say not so, Herbert! Say not so!"
"Look here!" he said. "When'd you see Patty again between this afternoon
and when you came over here?"
"What makes you think I saw her?"
"Did you telephone her?"
"What makes you think so?"
Once more Herbert gulped. "Well, I guess you're ready to believe
anything anybody tells you," he said, with palsied bravado. "You don't
believe everything Patty Fairchild says, do you?"
"Why, Herbert! Doesn't she always tell the _truth_?"
"Her? Why, half the time," poor Herbert babbled, "you can't tell whether
she's just makin' up what she says or not. If you've gone and believed
everything that ole girl told you, you haven't got even what little
sense I used to think you had!" So base we are under strain,
sometimes--so base when our good name is threatened with the truth of
us! "I wouldn't believe anything she said," he added, in a sickish
voice, "if she told me fifty times and crossed her heart!"
"Wouldn't you if she said you _wrote down_ how pretty you knew your eyes
were, Herbert? Wouldn't you if it was on paper in your own handwriting?"
"What's this about Herbert having 'pretty eyes'?" Uncle Joe inquired,
again bringing general attention to the young cousins; and Herbert
shuddered. This fat uncle had an unpleasant reputation as a joker.
The nephew desperately fell back upon the hopeless device of attempting
to drown out his opponent's voice as she began to reply. He became
vociferous with scornful laughter, badly cracked. "Florence got mad!" he
shouted, mingling the purported information with hoots and cacklings.
"She got mad because I and Henry played some games with Patty and
wouldn't let her play! She's tryin' to make up stories on us to get
even. She made it up! It's all made up! She----"
"No, no," Mr. Atwater interrupted. "Let Florence tell us. Florence,
what was it about Herbert's knowing he had 'pretty eyes'?"
Herbert attempted to continue the drowning out. He bawled. "She made it
_up_! It's somep'n she made up her_self_! She----"
"Herbert," said Uncle Joseph;--"if you don't keep quiet, I'll take back
the printing-press."
Herbert substituted a gulp for the continuation of his noise.
"Now, Florence," said Uncle Joseph, "tell us what you were saying about
how Herbert knows he has such 'pretty eyes'."
Then it seemed to Herbert that a miracle befell. Florence looked up,
smiling modestly. "Oh, it wasn't anything, Uncle Joseph," she said. "I
was Just trying to tease Herbert any way I could think of."
"Oh, was that all?" A hopeful light faded out of Uncle Joseph's large
and inexpressive face. "I thought perhaps you'd detected him in some
indiscretion."
Florence laughed, "I was just teasin' him. It wasn't anything, Uncle
Joseph."
Hereupon, Herbert resumed a confused breathing. Dazed, he remained
uneasy, profoundly so: and gratitude was no part of his emotion. He
well understood that in conflicts such as these Florence was never
susceptible to impulses of compassion; in fact, if there was warfare
between them, experience had taught him to be wariest when she seemed
kindest. He moved away from her, and went into another room where his
condition was one of increasing mental discomfort, though he looked over
the pictures in his great-uncle's copy of "Paradise Lost." These
illustrations, by M. Gustave Doré, failed to aid in reassuring his
troubled mind.
When Florence left the house, he impulsively accompanied her,
maintaining a nervous silence as they walked the short distance between
Uncle Joseph's front gate and her own. There, however, he spoke.
"Look here! You don't haf to go and believe everything that ole girl
told you, do you?"
"No," said Florence heartily. "I don't haf to."
"Well, look here," he urged, helpless but to repeat. "You don't haf to
believe whatever it was she went and told you, do you?"
"What was it you think she told me, Herbert?"
"All that guff--you know. Well, whatever it was you _said_ she told
you."
"I didn't," said Florence. "I didn't say she told me anything at all."
"Well, she did, didn't she?"
"Why, no," Florence replied, lightly. "She didn't say anything to _me_.
Only I'm glad to have your _opinion_ of her, how she's such a
story-teller and all--if I ever want to tell her, and everything!"
But Herbert had greater alarms than this, and the greater obscured the
lesser. "Look here," he said, "if she didn't tell you, how'd you know it
then?"
"How'd I know what?"
"That--that big story about my ever writin' I knew I had"--he gulped
again--"pretty eyes."
"Oh, about _that_!" Florence said, and swung the gate shut between them.
"Well, I guess it's too late to tell you to-night, Herbert; but maybe if
you and that nasty little Henry Rooter do every single thing I tell you
to, and do it just _exackly_ like I tell you from this time on, why
maybe--I only say 'maybe'--well, maybe I'll tell you some day when I
feel like it."
She ran up the path and up the veranda steps, but paused before opening
the front door, and called back to the waiting Herbert:
"The only person I'd ever _think_ of tellin' about it before I tell you
would be a boy I know." She coughed, and added as by an afterthought,
"He'd just love to know all about it; I know he would. So, when I tell
anybody about it I'll only tell just you and this other boy."
"What other boy?" Herbert demanded.
And her reply, thrilling through the darkness, left him demoralized with
horror.
"Wallie Torbin!"