"I don't know as I can express it, but it suggests that a great deal might be enjoyed that one could not put in his mouth or his pocket." "Mr. Roger," cried Belle, "you are coming on famously. I didn't know that you were inclined, hitherto, to put everything you liked in your mouth or pocket. What escapes some people may have had." "I never said I liked you," retorted the youth, with a touch of the broad repartee with which he was accustomed to hold his own among the girls in the country. "No, but if I saw that you liked some one else I might be alarmed"--and she looked mischievously toward Mildred. For reasons inexplicable to himself, he fell into a sudden confusion at this sally. With a warning glance at the incorrigible Belle, whose vital elements were frolic and nonsense, Mildred began talking to Mr. Atwood about the great hotel a few miles distant. "Would you like to go there?" asked Roger after a little. "No," she said; "I have not the slightest wish to go there." Indeed there was nothing that she shrank from more than the chance of meeting those who had known her in the city. Later in the day Susan said to her mother, with much satisfaction, "She's not stuck up at all, and we might have found it out before. I can't go back to the kitchen and live in our old haphazard way. I can see now that it wasn't nice at all." "We'll see," said the politic Mrs. Atwood. "We mustn't drive father too fast." Roger felt that at last he was getting acquainted, and he looked forward to the long summer evening with much hope. But nothing happened as he expected, for Mildred was silent and preoccupied at supper, and Mrs. Jocelyn appeared to have relapsed into her old depression. Instead of going out in his buggy to spend the evening with one of his many favorites, as had been his custom, he took a book and sat down under a tree near the porch, so that he might join Mildred if she gave him any encouragement to do so. Belle found him taciturn and far removed from his gay mood of the morning, and so at last left him in peace.