This playing with fire is hardly prudent.
‘Sometimes,’ says she demurely.
‘And you, Bonnie?’ asks Crosby, pinching gently the child’s pale pretty cheek as he rests on Dominick’s back. ‘You like them, I’m sure. Well, I’ll send you some to-morrow and every day while they last, and perhaps the red of their cheeks will run into yours. See that it does, now.’
The child laughs shyly, and Crosby turns to Susan again.
‘Good-bye, Miss Barry.’
‘Oh, don’t call her that!’ cries Betty. ‘That makes her sound like Aunt Jemima. Susan, tell him he can call you by your own name.’
This handsome advice ought, thinks Crosby, to fill Susan with angry confusion. But it doesn’t.
‘You may—you may indeed!’ says she, quite sweetly and naturally, looking him fair in the eyes. ‘I should like you to call me Susan, and I am very much obliged to you for promising the cherries to Bonnie.’
She gives him her hand; he presses it, and goes up the road towards his home. A little thorn in his heart goes with him. If he had been her own age, would she so readily have permitted him to call her Susan? No doubt she regards him as quite a middle-aged old fellow, and truly, next to her youth, that promises to be eternal, he is nothing less.