She partly raised up to recapture her hazel branch, and when she sat down again her shoulder remained lightly touching his arm. An electric thrill ran through him and tingled out at his fingertips, but he never moved a muscle. She looked up at him in peaceful happiness and he somehow felt very mean and unworthy. Her eyes made him uncomfortable. The whole trouble was that she was so honest--had never been taught to conceal her thoughts by the thousand and one spoken and unspoken lies of ordinary social intercourse. She was neither timid nor bold, but merely natural, with never a suspicion that conventionality demanded a man and a maid to leave a mutual liking unconfessed. It was rather rough on the young man. He was not used to having the truth fly around in such reckless fashion in his conversations with girls, and it bothered him. "I'm not a bit afraid of you," she presently told him. "I knew all the time that Aunt Mattie was wrong. She told me that all men were dreadful, and that the first thing they did was to--to kiss a girl they liked." "She knows nothing about it," he replied rather crossly. For some unaccountable reason he was angry with himself and with her. "Indeed, she doesn't," she agreed, eying him thoughtfully. Presently she added: "I do not believe, though, that I should have minded it so much if she had been right." Shade of Plato! He looked down at the tempting curve of her red lips. They were round and full and soft as the petals of a half-blown rosebud, warm and tender and sweet, with just the least trace of puckering to indicate how they could meet the pressure of other lips. He felt his heart come pounding up into the region of his Adam's apple, and he trembled as he had not done since his first attack of puppy love at the age of fourteen. His breath came and went with a painful flutter but he made no movement. If it had been any sort of a girl under the sun, especially if so attractive as this one, she would have been kissed until she gasped for breath; but he just couldn't do it. However, if she went so far as to _ask_ him to kiss her, _by George_! he didn't see how he was to get out of it! "I should really like to kiss you," he admitted with a martyr-like sigh and a further echo of her own frankness, "but I shan't. Under the circumstances it would not be right." He reflected, grinning, that mother would be proud if she could see him now, then he thought, grinning harder, of the boys at the club. If _they_ only knew! "There, didn't I say so!" she triumphantly exclaimed. "I told Aunt Matilda that there certainly must be _some_ good men in the world!" Good! He winced as certain memories of his careless youth began to do cake-walks up and down his conscience. Then he changed the subject.