“You must not tell me that either,” Gertie said. “I’m glad if you think me pretty, and glad to have you like me, but you mustn’t tell me so. It’s very bad, for Auntie Rogers says young men like you never talk to girls like me for good, and I must not let you.” “What kind of a girl are you, pray?” Godfrey asked, feeling more and more amused and interested with this quaint little creature, who replied: “I am poor, and have not any relatives except a grandmother, and I don’t know where she is. But my mother was a lady, auntie says, and I once lived in a big house with servants, and auntie was my nurse. I don’t know where it was or why I left it when mother died. Auntie does not tell me, and she is so kind, and I have forty pounds a year of my own, and maybe I shall learn a trade, or teach school in America, and some time marry respectably, but I’m not the kind of girl for a man like you to kiss and talk to.” “Gertie, you are a brick!” came emphatically from the amused Godfrey, who felt a great desire to kiss the full lips again in his admiration of the child. But he dared not do it. Indeed, there was something about her which inspired him with a respect such as he had never before felt for a girl, and as he told Robert Macpherson in confidence, he wanted to crawl into his boots when, after his assertion that she was a brick, she lifted her eyes so wonderingly, and said: “I’m a what?” “A brick,” he answered; “don’t you know what that is?” “Yes, I know it in its place; but I don’t know what you mean when you give the name to me. Nothing bad, I hope.” “Certainly not; it’s a compliment. I called you so because I like you and think you smart,—clever, you English would say, I suppose.” And Godfrey began to shake down his pants, and stand first on one foot and then upon the other, in his perplexity how to appear well in the mind of this little girl, who was so young, and innocent, and honest, and yet so old in some things. “That’s slang, isn’t it?” Gertie asked. And he replied: “Yes, I suppose it would be called so, but it is very expressive. Don’t you like slang?” “No, I do not, and I don’t see why nice people like you should use it so much.” “Do I use it so much?” Godfrey asked. And the girl replied: “I heard you once at Oakwood, when you did not know I was there in the kitchen, say ‘by George,’ and ‘by Jove,’ three times right along, and you called your father the ‘governor,’ and one of the maids said she supposed it was Yankee slang.” Godfrey’s face was scarlet at this reproof, which he knew he merited, and for a moment he did not know what to say. Soon rallying, however, he said, good-naturedly: “I guess I am rather given to slang,—the girls at home nag me about it all the time, and I do it to tease them; but I’ll quit it now, by Jo—I beg your pardon. I did not know I was so given to it, and I will reform, by George! There! that was to finish up.”