"Hey?"
"Not now exactly, but don't you ever think about the future?"
Jerry looked vaguely alarmed for a single instant, and then strutted off with his hands in his pockets, whistling defiantly all across the lawn. He stopped at the barn door, and whistled his way back, in time to catch a friendly ball.
The feminine wile that eventually won the young gentleman's heart, and "did for" the girl with the pet monkey, was Val's gift for turning the most surprisingly rapid somersaults all across the drying-ground. A small contorting ball, she rolled head over heels, without stopping, from one side to the other, and came up smiling, in spite of a crack on her crown against the pump.
"Gee-rusalem!" observed Jerry, when he saw she was laughing. "I say," he added, with a child's fine disregard for preface or preliminary—"I say, come over to Bentley's Pond and let's be pirates."
It seems highly probable that Val would have closed with the offer if Emmie had not made a timely appearance.
"What you doin'?" she asked, Jerry being invisible.
"None o' your business," said her polite sister.
"Oh-h," purred Emmie. "Gamma don't let us—"
She paused.