"You are. Sticky with sweetness." "What a dear stupid thing!" sighed Boodles. "Let me kiss your lovely pink and white girl's face--there--and there--and there." "Boodles, dear, I haven't got a girl's face," protested Aubrey. "Oh, but you have, my boy. It's just like a girl's--only prettier. If I was you, and you was me--that sounds rather shocking grammar, but it don't matter--every one would say: 'Look at that ugly boy with that boodle-oodle, lovely, _bu_tiful girl.' There! I've squeezed every bit of breath out of him," cried Boodles. There was a certain amount left, as she soon discovered; enough to smother her. "If you hadn't got golden hair, and freckles, I should never have fallen in love with you," declared the boy. "If you were to lose your freckles, if you lost only one, the tiniest of them all, I shouldn't love you any more." "And if you lose that dear girl's face I won't love you," promised Boodles. "If you had a horrid moustache to tickle me and make me sneeze, I wouldn't give you the smallest, teeniest, wee bit of a kiss. Well, you can't anyhow, because you've got to be an admiral. How nice it will be when you are grown up and have a lot of ships of your own." "We shall be married long before then. Boodles, darling," cried the eager boy. "Directly I am twenty-one we will be married. Only five more years." "Such a lot happens in a year," sighed Boodles. "You may meet five more girls far more sunshiny than me, with redder hair and more freckles, since you are so fond of them--" "I shan't. You are the only girl who ever was or shall be." That is how boys talk when they are sixteen, and when they are twenty-six, and sometimes when they are very old boys of sixty; and girls generally believe them. "I wonder if it is right of you to love me," said Boodles doubtfully. The answer was what might have been looked for, and ended with the usual question: "Why not?" "Because I'm only a baby." "You are fourteen, darling. You will be nineteen by the time we are married."