His eyes flashed with a new resolution as he rode up close by her side. “Miss Tibby, were you never serious in your life,” he asked, bending toward her. The girl slackened her horse’s pace and looked over and past him reflectively. “Yes, once,” she said at last, as if she had taken time to review her life from the beginning. “I should like to know when it was.” “Well, I will tell you, though it is a very impertinent question for you to ask, and I feel under no obligation to answer it. It was when I lived in the country and had an attack of quinsy. I couldn’t speak for three whole days, and the village doctor diagnosed my case as diphtheria. I expected to die, of course, and I really felt quite serious and anxious, I must confess.” “You had reason to, if you could not talk,” Donald replied in a dry tone. “So I thought. When one can neither talk nor breathe, one has time for serious reflection. Now, please, Mr. Bartram, don’t say anything about the delight of my friends under the circumstances, for I think I have heard something of the kind before. I wrote notes to them.” “That must have been delightful.” “For them or me?” “Both. Miss Waring, why are you so unlike other girls?” Tibby opened her eyes to their widest extent. “You alarm me, Mr. Bartram,” she said. “How am I different? I’ll wager two bits that I know. It’s these freckles on the side of my nose.” She turned her head toward him with a bewitching air of candor. “I don’t mind them, indeed I don’t. Besides, they are not there all the time, only since I came here and rode about in the sun and wind so much.” “I am afraid you are incorrigible. You know very well that’s not what I mean.” “O, isn’t it?” ruefully. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me how I am at fault. I don’t want to be told. I—am very sensitive, as sensitive as a—a nettle, so please do let me down easy, that’s a good fellow,” she said in a wheedling tone. “You are not sensitive. You don’t care what any one says or thinks of you.” “Don’t I? Then I must be desperately wicked. My mother used to say that Don’t Care represented total depravity.” “It is evident you do not care what I think of you,” Donald said, looking straight before him. “Mr. Bartram, your discernment is wonderful; or is it intuition? Whichever it is, you arrive at correct conclusions. What did you kill when you went hunting last week? Lovely little birds, whose song has been wantonly stilled forever?” “Indeed, no. I am not so wicked as to kill song birds, not even though heartless women delight to decorate their hats with their dead bodies.” “Ugh, I do not,” said Tibby, with a shudder. “I don’t even like women who are thoughtless enough to wear them. They are as bad as the Indians who love to dangle scalp-locks from their belts.” “Granted it is thoughtlessness rather than carelessness, why do you not make it your business to do missionary work among your fashionable sisters and help save the birds.” The girl shook her head slowly.