He waved his cap to me with a half-timid, friendly, reassuring gesture.
“Oh!” I said, turning red with shame at the thought that I had been caught crying. “Oh, I must go!”
“No, don’t go,” he protested. “If you’re going because I’m here, I’ll go myself.”
“Oh, no; it’s not at all on your account,” I explained politely. “But it must be very nearly dinner-time,” and I glanced at the brilliant afterglow which transfigured the western heavens.
Then I glanced at him. He was distinctly a nice-looking boy, and after the surprise of the first moment, I felt no very great desire to go away.
“It isn’t late,” he reassured me. “It can’t be dinner-time, yet. May I come down?”
I eyed him doubtfully. He seemed rather a self-assured boy, and I wondered what Dick would think of him. I wondered if he thought me a molly-coddle because he had seen me crying. I shared all Dick’s horror of girls or boys who cry. Then I wondered if my eyes were very red, and wiped them with my handkerchief.
“The wall,” I ventured, “was probably put there to keep people out.”
“Not to keep one’s friends out,” he protested. “One ought to be glad if one’s friends are willing to climb over such a high wall to see one.”
He was smiling in the pleasantest way, and I really couldn’t help smiling back.