"Barbs," he said, "you're an old silly billy, and I love you with all my heart and soul. That's _that_. Don't forget it. Take pen and ink if necessary and write it down. I'll try a little more patience, and then, my blessing, if there's no good in that, I shall perpetrate marriage by capture." They both laughed, the girl with much sweetness. And she said: "If you and I ever do marry, it will be with great suddenness." Her eyes danced, and she added: "There are moments!" "Thank you," he said gravely, and then with a kind of wistful gallantry: "Could I kiss the dear for luck?" She turned her cheek to him bravely and frankly like a child. His lips touched it lightly, making no sound. Far off in the native jungle the cave-man moaned, and shut his eyes and turned his face to the wall of his cave. The medicine-man came, examined him, and said that he was about to die of a new disease. He looked very wise and called it "predatory inanition." As for the cave-girl, having run and run and run, she pulled up in a flowery glade, looked behind, listened, saw nothing, heard no sound of painfully pursuing feet, and called herself a fool and a silly for having run. She wanted to explain that she hadn't meant to run away, that girls never really meant what they said, and would the cave-man please recover at once from his predatory inanition and take notice of her again? "Come," said Barbara, after quite a long silence, "let's go forth and collar a taxi. Anywhere I can take you? I can't ask you to lunch, because I am having seven maidens, and afterward Victor Polideon to teach us to turkey-trot." "I wouldn't be afraid of seven devils," Wilmot urged in his own behalf, "if you were present." "There are only two," she said practically, "and they are very little devils. But I won't let you come, because you would have much too good a time." Then she relented. "Come later, about three, and teach me to turkey-trot. You do it better than Polideon. And I hate to have him touch me." "That's something," he exclaimed triumphantly. "What's something?" "That you don't hate for me to touch you." She laughed and tapped his shoulder in rag-time. Also she whistled, and did a quiet suspicion of a turkey-trot with her feet. VI One bright morning in May, divinely early, two persons of very different appearance and nature came out of two houses of very different appearance and nature at precisely the same moment, and started to move toward each other by methods of locomotion no less different than were the appearances of the respective persons or the respective houses from which they emerged. The house from which the one issued was of speckless white marble, and looked from the advantageous corner of Sixty-something Street and Fifth Avenue upon the purple and white lilacs and the engaging spring greens of Central Park.