"What? What's that?" Adela appeared a little dazed.
"I mean the words," he explained. "Didn't you know there were words in it?"
"Oh, that part along the middle," said the girl. Her gray eyes took on a far-off, dreamy expression. "Yes; they are words."
Lance controlled his excitement, which still seemed to him causeless and rather annoying. "I wonder if I read them right?" he hazarded. "Would you like to see how they looked to me?"
He drew out a bit of paper on which he had written them, and showed it to her. The action seemed to rouse her taciturn father slightly. But Adela gazed at the paper, and said, with an incredulous laugh: "Oh, no, they don't look like that!"
"Can you read?" Lance demanded.
"Yes, a little; but they don't look like that."
"Well, at any rate, they mean something," he retorted; "and this is what they mean."
He read the rhyme aloud, and their eyes met.
"Yes," she admitted; "I suppose that's how it goes;" and she crooned the distich over, as if singing to herself.