“I’m a walker; I’ll risk the distance,” replied Cis, and they started out.
Three miles from the Beacon Head they came into a pretty glade, wooded, suggestive at a glance of song birds and flowers. Here they seated themselves, Cis on a bank, G. Rodney Moore just below her. All the way there they had talked, Cis with her customary frankness, till, on their arrival, Moore had justly decided that she was exactly what she seemed and announced herself to be; a single-minded, honest girl, of extraordinary directness and simplicity; lonely, wanting comradeship, not hesitating to take it where she should find it, with confidence that she would find understanding where she found congeniality, and without the smallest shade of coquetry, or of hidden purpose.
“Mighty odd, quite unique, but the gods were good to me when they let her decide that I’d answer for a stop-gap till she got acquainted in Beaconhite. Never saw her equal! It will be my own fault if I let her drift away from me, and I won’t!” he told himself, listening to Cis’s merry talk, watching her changing face, all gay laughter and wholesome sweetness, its red hair framing it in an aureole, wind-made.
Cis told Rodney all about herself; he told her some things about himself. They were friends at the end of the little excursion, “pals,” Cis liked to call it, finding this “pal” more delightful than any other she had known; clever, humorous, charming. She did not hesitate to speak of this charm.
“I didn’t know anyone but a girl had your kind of fun; boys don’t usually know how to play your way,” Cis cried delightedly. “You’re lots of fun, and you’re really as nice as you can be!”
“I’m not a boy, Cicely,” Rodney replied, a trifle sadly—they were Cicely and Rodney by this time. “I don’t suppose I played this way when I was a boy, but I had the material in me and experience cultivated it. Glad you like me, jolly Cicely.”
“Yes, I do. It was luck that made me find you to-day; I knew luck was running my way when I came to Beaconhite! Aren’t you a boy, quite young, anyway? You haven’t told me that,” said Cis.
“I’m thirty, shall be thirty-one next spring, and that’s beyond boyhood. Why do you lay such stress on boyhood, my dear? Neither it, nor girlhood lasts,” he said.
“I shall be twenty-two on Christmas Day,” said Cis slowly. “I don’t know why, but I belong with boys; I don’t belong with grown men.”
“Only with this grown man. We’re friends, and dates don’t alter it,” he said quickly. “Were you born on Christmas Day? What a sell! Shame, Pal-Cicely.”