The drooped lids raised; brown eyes looked steadily into brown eyes.
“I didn’t want to wake up,” he said.
The candor of this explanation threw her, for the moment, into a vivid and becoming confusion. The dusky roses leaped to her cheeks; the long, dark lashes quivered and fell. Then she rose to the occasion.
“And how about the little eohippus?” she demanded. “That doesn’t seem to go well with some of your other talk.”
“Oh!” He regarded her with pained but unflinching innocence. “The Latin, you mean? Why, ma’am, that’s most all the Latin I know—that and some more big words in that song. I learned that song off of Frank John, just like a poll-parrot.”
“Sing it! And eohippus isn’t Latin. It’s Greek.”
“Why, ma’am, I can’t, just now—I’m so muddy; but I’ll tell it to you. Maybe I’ll sing it to you some other time.” A sidelong glance accompanied this little suggestion. The girl’s face was blank and non-committal; so he resumed: “It goes like this:
“Said the little Eohippus,
‘I’m going to be a horse,
And on my middle fingernails
To run my earthly course’——
“No; that wasn’t the first. It begins:
“There was once a little animal
No bigger than a fox,
And on five toes he scampered——