"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."