Joel suddenly realized his responsibility as a mentor of youth. "Look here! Look here! I can't have such talk. You're making that up out of your own head. You never lived near a giant, and I don't believe you ever had a sling." "Oh, yes, I had a sling, Uncle Joel, and once I shooted a bear with it--and a Indian." "I guess you haven't been very well brought up," rebuked Joel, who like most people of his type was quite unable to distinguish between the gambols of the creative imagination and deliberate falsifying. "Don't you know where little girls go when they tell lies?" "I knew a little girl once who telled lies," admitted Celia, her shocked accents indicating her full appreciation of the reprehensible character of the practise. "And she went to the circus. Her uncle took her." From under the bed clothing came a peculiar rasping sound like the grating of a rusty key in a lock long unused. It was no wonder that Celia jumped, though she was considerably less startled than Joel himself. He had laughed, and more appalling still, had laughed at unmistakable evidences of natural depravity which by good rights should have awakened in him emotions of abhorrence. "It would be pretty serious for me to backslide now, considering the state of my health," reflected Joel. He attempted to counteract the effects of that indiscreet laugh by a blood-curdling groan, and this demonstration caused Celia to repeat her calming ministrations, smoothing his rough cheek with velvety hands, and inadvertently poking one plump forefinger into his eye. Joel blinked. He could easily have ordered her from the room, but he did not exercise this prerogative. He was vaguely conscious of an unwarranted satisfaction in the nearness of this pixy. Her preference for his society flattered his vanity. He observed her guardedly from the corner of his eye. Undoubtedly she was a very naughty little girl who told wrong stories and was painfully lacking in reverence. But at the same time--Joel chuckled again, his vocal chords responding uncertainly to the unfamiliar prompting--at the same time she was cute. At the supper table the evening before for all his gloomy abstraction, Joel had noticed Betty's engaging prettiness and had thought _apropos_ of Celia, "Persis never picked that young one out for her looks." Now through half closed eyes he studied the small piquant face and found his opinion altered. Celia was not pretty. Her straight black hair, just long enough to be continually in her eyes, was pushed back for the moment so as to stand almost erect like a crest. Her small nose had an engaging skyward tilt. She was dark and inclined to sallowness. But the twinkling black eyes under the level brows would have redeemed a far plainer face. Had Joel been of a poetic temperament he would have compared Betty to a pink rose-bud, and Celia to a velvety pansy, saucy and bewitching.