"I could if I had one!"
Finding her first venture had not roused the lion, but fearing him a little still, she went on defiantly:
"I saw a man fill one once!"
Such a statement as that surely could not fail to crush a mere user of the pen! Seeing that astonishment was expected of him, Masters assumed an appropriate look of surprise. His wearing of it pleased her mightily.
"Perhaps," he said, "you would like to make quite sure you could write with one, eh? Would you like to try with this?"
The blue eyes brightened; she was at his side in a moment. Shyness is readily overcome when our summers have not numbered five. Trustfulness at that age has rarely been shocked.
Therein, perhaps, lay the secret of the attraction children had for Masters: the sweetness of their suspicionless existence. Viewed from the standpoint of the after life, when—if we act up to the axioms of the world we live in—we trust no man, it is apt to brush across us as refreshingly as a gust of country air.
Turning the leaves of his book till he came to a blank page, Masters twisted and rested the cover on his knee. So the open leaf was level with the intending—eyes-sparkling-with-excitement—writer. Then he gave the child his pen.
She drew a capital G—a bright little point of tongue protruding the while. The head, too, seemed to follow the movements of the hand. Her intent was plain: to write her own name.
That was compassed. It took a little time—entailed a huge expenditure of concentrated energy—but she got through with it at last. There figured on the paper the words: