Suiting her action to the word, she picked up a red book and sent it in a gentle hyperbola toward the ceiling, where it sank into the lamp beside the first. It was a few minutes before either of them could do more than rock back and forth in helpless glee; but then by mutual agreement they took up the sport anew, this time in unison. Merlin seized a large, specially bound French classic and whirled it upward. Applauding his own accuracy, he took a best-seller in one hand and a book on barnacles in the other, and waited breathlessly while she made her shot. Then the business waxed fast and furious--sometimes they alternated, and, watching, he found how supple she was in every movement; sometimes one of them made shot after shot, picking up the nearest book, sending it off, merely taking time to follow it with a glance before reaching for another. Within three minutes they had cleared a little place on the table, and the lamp of crimson satin was so bulging with books that it was near breaking. “Silly game, basket-ball,” she cried scornfully as a book left her hand. “High-school girls play it in hideous bloomers.” “Idiotic,” he agreed. She paused in the act of tossing a book, and replaced it suddenly in its position on the table. “I think we’ve got room to sit down now,” she said gravely. They had; they had cleared an ample space for two. With a faint touch of nervousness Merlin glanced toward Mr. Moonlight Quill’s glass partition, but the three heads were still bent earnestly over their work, and it was evident that they had not seen what had gone on in the shop. So when Caroline put her hands on the table and hoisted herself up Merlin calmly imitated her, and they sat side by side looking very earnestly at each other. “I had to see you,” she began, with a rather pathetic expression in her brown eyes. “I know.” “It was that last time,” she continued, her voice trembling a little, though she tried to keep it steady. “I was frightened. I don’t like you to eat off the dresser. I’m so afraid you’ll--you’ll swallow a collar button.” “I did once--almost,” he confessed reluctantly, “but it’s not so easy, you know. I mean you can swallow the flat part easy enough or else the other part--that is, separately--but for a whole collar button you’d have to have a specially made throat.” He was astonishing himself by the debonnaire appropriateness of his remarks. Words seemed for the first time in his life to run at him shrieking to be used, gathering themselves into carefully arranged squads and platoons, and being presented to him by punctilious adjutants of paragraphs. “That’s what scared me,” she said. “I knew you had to have a specially made throat--and I knew, at least I felt sure, that you didn’t have one.” He nodded frankly. “I haven’t. It costs money to have one--more money unfortunately than I possess.”