Alice wanted to ask what polywogs were, but would not interrupt the boy, who went on: “He met you last night, don’t you know, and carried you into the house.” “Not me; that was my cousin. _You_ helped me,” Alice said, and asked next, “Are there any other gentlemen in the hotel beside Mr. Hilton?” “My, yes; I guess there is,” and Jeff warmed up at once. “There’s Mr. Mason from Boston. Awful swell; takes a bath and has his shoes blacked every morning, and wears a clean shirt and collar and cuffs every day. I only wear one shirt a week. Mr. Hilton wears three.” Alice thought it possible that neither Mr. Hilton nor Craig Mason would care for her to have a more intimate knowledge of their habits, and began to speak of Mr. and Mrs. Taylor. Here, too, Jeff was very communicative. “Mr. Taylor was fust rate, and let a feller alone,” he said. Some called him shiffless, but he liked that kind of shiffless that wasn’a allus pitchin’ in to a chap. Miss Taylor was boss, and smart as chain lightnin’, only she couldn’t git round quite so quick, she was so big,—tipped the scale at two hundred. He liked her some and should like her more if she didn’t make him go to Sunday-school and learn twenty verses in the Bible beside. He was through with the Sermon on the Mount, and was tackling Nicodemus, which was easier. They had reached the hotel by this time, and with every step Alice’s interest had increased in Jeff, whose admiration for her had kept pace with her interest in him. He offered to go with her to the woods and show her a big hornet’s nest and a mud turtle’s bed in the pond, of which no one knew but himself, and he made her take half of the lilies, refusing any remuneration at first. Then, suddenly, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, he said, “If you want to pay me so bad give me a dime and we’ll call it square.” Alice put her hand in her pocket for her purse, which was gone, with her handkerchief and her gloves, which she had taken off when she helped pull in the lilies. Before she could utter an exclamation of surprise, Jeff, who was watching her, had turned a summersault and was on his feet with her missing articles in his hand. “Here they be,” he said, but the laugh died away when he saw the expression of Alice’s face and the tears in her eyes as she said, “Oh, Jefferson, how could you! You promised you wouldn’t, and I believed you.” If she had struck him she would not have hurt him as much as did the sight of her tears and the sound of her voice. “I didn’t mean to when I promised, but I wanted to try it just once more,” he said. “I’m awfully sorry, and I’ll never do it again, never. I don’t want to be a bad boy.” “I am sure you don’t, and as a beginning, never try that trick again,” Alice said, putting her hand on his hair and smoothing it as she talked. “I won’t; I won’t,” Jeff said, “and you’ll go with me to see the hornet’s nest and the mud turkles just the same?”