Billy gazed down on her with tender eyes, his heart beating faster with a manly, protecting feeling new to him. “Anyway I’m big enough and old enough to do just my level best to make things easy for you. Let me know how I can, won’t you?”
“Yes, Billy, I will. Oh, you’re such a comfort!” And because she was worn out by a stormy interview with her father that she was too proud to repeat, she could not restrain the sob that came with the last word.
That was too much for impressionable Billy. He put his arms around her and kissed her.
Often in fun and frolic he had kissed girls more to tease them than to please himself; but this was very different,—his first man’s kiss; and with its sweetness mingled a quick-born sense of responsibility and the acceptance of a man’s part. He had put himself on record with her; the kiss was the compact.
They walked for blocks in silence, and separated at the end of her street with but a word of good-bye; speech seemed superfluous.
That night Billy went to bed having a secret his mother could not share, for it was Erminie’s rather than his own. Life seemed very portentous, big with duties and prospects that belonged to a new world. All his past was but a flash, a gleam of childish nonsense. Now he was a man!
CHAPTER III
“POP” STREETER’S PROPOSITION
FOR the first time he could remember, Billy was sleepless till the sun rose. All night long he thought and thought. He had considered his life rather complex—he was leader of one of the patrols of his troop, the Olympics; he had a part in the school drama which he had believed very important. And on waking came the sudden remembrance of the talk Mr. Streeter was to give soon on the matter of Good Citizens’ Clubs. Billy was sponsor for that, and must see it through. Also it looked still more as if he would not be able to avoid the clash with the bully.
But all this was trivial now, childish. He could no longer think of himself alone,—there would be two. That kiss—that kiss was his pledge, a consecration of his life to Erminie’s happiness.