“Jogged off your range quite a bit, haven’t you?” she suggested.
“Some. I’ll take two bits’ worth of that smokin’, nina.”
She shook her head. “I’m no little girl. Don’t you know I’m now half past eighteen?”
“My—my. That ad didn’t do a mite of good, did it?”
“Not a bit.”
“And you growing older every day.”
“Does my age show?” she wanted to know anxiously.
The scarce veiled admiration of his smoldering eyes drew the blood to her dusky cheeks. Something vigilant lay crouched panther-like behind the laughter of his surface badinage.
“You’re standing it well, honey.”
The color beat into her face, less at the word than at the purring caress in his voice. A year ago she had been a child. But in the Southland flowers ripen fast. Adolescence steals hard upon the heels of infancy, and, though the girl had never wakened 67 to love, Nature was pushing her relentlessly toward a womanhood for which her unschooled impulses but scantily safeguarded her.