"I've known him always. He's like my brother."
"Well, if you should some day grow to know me 'always,' could you—even if I am thirty-seven—could you call me Richard?"
I made several violent white marks upon the old rock wall with the bit of stone in my hand before I attempted to answer this, the most intimate question ever put to me by a man in my life. Except for Alfred I had never known any other man well, and had certainly never cared about sitting with one upon an old stone wall while the glorious summer afternoon slipped by. All I knew of even incipient love-making I had read in books, so that I could not tell whether his question meant much or little. I had told him earlier in the afternoon that I was booked for a long visit in the city this fall, whereon he had congratulated himself on his friendly footing with the Claybornes. It was possible he meant—
"Could you?" he repeated softly.
I stopped making marks and threw away the bits of stone. I had opened my lips to reply, although I do not know what I had intended saying, when there was an Indian yell close behind us.
"Whoopee! Here he is again!" came an exultant voice, and, glancing around, we beheld a freshly bathed and dressed Waterloo, digging his white linen knees and elbows into the soft black earth, as he raised a radiant face and announced his second discovery of the "little tarrypin." Grapefruit followed him at a respectful distance, while Lares and Penates lingered shyly in the background when they espied us.
"And here's Ann," Waterloo explained, in great triumph, waving his hand in my direction. "We can make her tote 'im back to the house for us. She ain't skeered of 'em!"
"Quick! Tell me!" Richard Chalmers insisted, and his seriousness made me flippant.
"Age has nothing to do with it! It is entirely a matter of temperament!"
He laughed, quite like a boy, as he sprang down from the wall and extended both hands to help me. I grasped only one of his hands, and that very lightly, as I stepped to the ground.