"How soon did you come to know her well?"
"The first day when she kissed me."
"I think that's a very nice way of getting acquainted. Won't you let me kiss you good-night when you get sleepy."
She looked at me with a doubtful smile, and said, "I'm afraid thy mustache will tickle me."
The birds were singing in the orchard near, but there was not a note that to my ear was more musical than Miss Warren's laugh. I stooped down before the little girl as I said:
"Suppose we see if a kiss tickles you now, and if it don't now, you won't mind it then, you know."
She came hesitatingly to me, and gave the coveted salute with a delicious mingling of maidenly shyness and childish innocence and frankness.
"Ah!" I exclaimed, "Eden itself contained nothing better than that. To think that I should have been so honored—I who have written the records of enough crimes to sink a world!"
"Perhaps if you had committed some of them she wouldn't have kissed you."
"If I had to live in a ninety-nine story tenement-house, as so many do, I think I would have committed them all. Well, I may come to it. Life is a risky battle to such as I, but I'm in heaven now."