"For that speech, you shall have a bud for your lapel." And she plucked and fastened it, her face very close to mine. She gave me a moment of intense discomfort which was only half embarrassment. She had planned well. She was a part of the purity and sweetness of this lovely summer garden. Guile and she were miles asunder. "Thanks," I muttered, smelling the blossom with some ostentation. "Then we're going to be friends?" she queried archly. "I'm not aware that we were ever anything else," I replied easily. "Come now, Mr. Canby. You know we haven't always understood each other. I'm sure each of us has been frightfully jealous of the other. Isn't it so?" "Jealous! I? Of you, Miss Van Wyck?" "Don't let's misunderstand again. I'm frightfully cheerful this afternoon. It mightn't happen again for weeks. I couldn't quarrel with fate itself. You did want Jerry to carry your doctrines out into the world with him, didn't you?" "I'm not aware--" "And I discovered him far too stodgy to endure. It wasn't so much that your philosophy and mine differed as the difference they made in Jerry. And so we clashed. I won." I was silent. "Didn't I, Mr. Canby?" she persisted, in her gentlest tone. "Jerry is out of my hands, Miss Van Wyck," I managed coolly. "And in mine?" "Yes, in yours," after a pause. She laughed softly. "What do you suppose I'm going to do with him?" The glamour of youth in a garden, her rare humor and the cloudless day--I had managed well so far, but she pressed me hard. Jerry was no chattel to be bandied carelessly. I felt my body stiffening. "Jerry is very sweet, Mr. Canby," she went on with that softness of voice that I had grown to understand. "He does anything, everything that I ask him to. It really is a great responsibility. Human judgment is so fallible, especially a woman's. Suppose I asked him to become a nihilist or President, or even both." D--- the vixen. She was making game of me. But I struggled to hold my temper, taking her literally. "Nihilism? Political or moral, Miss Van Wyck? To one of your means, the first would be inconvenient; to one of your affections, the other dangerous." She flashed a narrow glance at me. "_Touchee._ I like the thrust from cover, but I can parry. Suppose that I said that I would relinquish Jerry." "I'm not sure that you can," I replied coolly. Our glances met again. She knew that I read her. "Nothing is impossible to intelligence. I could send him away tomorrow, today--" "But he would come back." "You frighten me," she said, shuddering prettily. "That is precisely what I wish to do," I went on stolidly. "Threats!" I shrugged. "You underestimate him, that's all." "Perhaps. You know, Mr. Canby, that you improve vastly on acquaintance. If you were younger--" She paused and looked at me slantwise. "Ingenuous, handsome, a fighting god--!"