This playing with fire is hardly prudent. ‘Sometimes,’ says she demurely. ‘And you, Bonnie?’ asks Crosby, pinching gently the child’s pale pretty cheek as he rests on Dominick’s back. ‘You like them, I’m sure. Well, I’ll send you some to-morrow and every day while they last, and perhaps the red of their cheeks will run into yours. See that it does, now.’ The child laughs shyly, and Crosby turns to Susan again. ‘Good-bye, Miss Barry.’ ‘Oh, don’t call her that!’ cries Betty. ‘That makes her sound like Aunt Jemima. Susan, tell him he can call you by your own name.’ This handsome advice ought, thinks Crosby, to fill Susan with angry confusion. But it doesn’t. ‘You may—you may indeed!’ says she, quite sweetly and naturally, looking him fair in the eyes. ‘I should like you to call me Susan, and I am very much obliged to you for promising the cherries to Bonnie.’ She gives him her hand; he presses it, and goes up the road towards his home. A little thorn in his heart goes with him. If he had been her own age, would she so readily have permitted him to call her Susan? No doubt she regards him as quite a middle-aged old fellow, and truly, next to her youth, that promises to be eternal, he is nothing less. CHAPTER XX. ‘Fear oftentimes restraineth words, But makes not thoughts to cease.’ The weather since the beginning of the summer has been exceptionally warm, and to-day has outdone itself. Here in the Cottage garden, surrounded by its ivied walls, the heat is excessive, and there is a certain languor in the lithe figure of the girl as she comes forward, the dog beside her, to greet Wyndham, that meets his eye. Perhaps nervousness has conduced to the pallor that is whitening her lips and brow, and is making even more striking the darkness of her appealing eyes. There is something about her so full of grief suppressed that he hastens to allay it. ‘I have come, you see,’ says he—he holds out his hand, and she lays hers in it; he holds it a moment—‘to speak about our rent.’ He smiles at her. The smile, to tell the truth, is a little grim, and hardly reassures her. ‘I have come to the conclusion that, as you wish to become my tenant, you must pay me a huge rent.’ ‘Ah! and I have been thinking,’ says she very sadly, with the mournful air of one who is giving up all that is worth having in this world, ‘that I shall not be your tenant at all, and shall never pay you any rent.’ ‘Do you mean to say,’ says Wyndham, reading her like a book, but humouring her mood, ‘that you’ve found another house more suited to you?’ ‘Oh no, it isn’t that. There is no house I shall ever like so well as this.’ ‘Then, let me tell you beforehand that I shall charge you a very handsome rent,’ persists Wyndham, trying to be genial. He smiles at her, but the smile is a dismal failure.