"Champ!" she stamped her foot to emphasize her demand; "if yer don't tell me yer ain't mad with me, I'll lave yer for good and all--so now!" "I don't know that I'm mad with you," he spoke at last in an aggrieved, a subdued tone; "I simply didn't think you could play me such a mean trick when I was in earnest, dead earnest." "Did yer mane it?" "Why, of course I did! You don't suppose a man walks three miles in a hot night to serenade a girl just to get an ounce of pepper in his nose by way of thanks, do you?" "I thought yer didn't mane it; Romanzo said yer was laughing at me for telling yer 'bout the lords and ladies a-making love with their guitars." The voice indicated some dejection of spirits. "He did, did he! I'll settle with Romanzo later." He heard a soft brushing of branches in the region of the Norway spruces and knew that the youth was in retreat. "And I'll settle it with you, too, Miss Aileen Armagh-and-don't-you-forget-it, in a way that'll make you remember the tag end of your name for one while!" This threat evidently had its effect. "Wot yer going to do?" He heard her draw her breath sharply. "Come down here and I'll tell you." "I can't. She might catch me. She told me I'd got to stay in my room after eight, and she's coming home ter-night. Wot yer going to do?" Champney laughed outright. "Don't you wish you might know, Aileen Armagh!" He took his banjo in one hand, lifted his cap with the other and, standing so, bareheaded in the moonlight, sang with all the simulated passion and pathos of which he was capable one of the few love songs that belong to the world, "Kathleen Mavoureen"; but he took pains to substitute "Aileen" for "Kathleen." Even Ann and Hannah, listening from the kitchen porch, began to feel sentimentally inclined when the clear voice rendered with tender pathos the last lines: "Oh! why art thou silent, thou voice of my heart? Oh! why art thou silent, Aileen Mavoureen?" Without so much as another glance at the little figure in the window, he ran across the lawn and up the lane to the highroad. IX On his way to The Greenbush he overtook Joel Quimber, and without warning linked his arm close in the old man's. At the sudden contact Joel started. "Uncle Jo, old chap, how are you? This seems like home to see you round." "Lord bless me, Champ, how you come on a feller! Here, stan' still till I get a good look at ye;--growed, growed out of all notion. Why, I hain't seen ye for good two year. You warn't to home last summer?" "Only for a week; I was off on a yachting cruise most of the time. Mother said you were up on the Bay then at your grandniece's--pretty girl. I remember you had her down here one Christmas."