"It's very strange," mused Jill in a tone of innocent speculation; "do you know that until to-day I had always considered you handsome? What a difference it makes to a face whether it is smiling or glum." "One can't keep up a perpetual grin," he retorted, but his countenance relaxed a little despite his effort to appear unmoved, and seeing her advantage she followed it up, turning a scene which had been growing painfully strained into a comedy by her deft handling of the situation. "No; not unless it is natural to one, which is even a greater affliction. I once heard of a man who had his nose broken for laughing at a quarrelsome individual in the street. As a matter of fact he wasn't laughing; it was only that Nature had endowed him with a perpetual and unavoidable grin. But you are not at all likely to get your nose broken from a similar cause." "I should hope not," he returned with disagreeable emphasis. "Is mine on my face still?" enquired Jill putting up her hand to feel. "Why! it actually is. Funny, but I thought you had snapped it off. It is there, isn't it?" She went quite close to him and held up her face for inspection with a look in her eyes that St. John would have been more than human, or at any rate not genuinely in love, had he resisted. He made no attempt to; he just took the small face between his two hands and kissed it. And then they sat down together on the twill covered box to spoon a little, and afterwards talk matters over from a practical, common sense view, as Jill declared; though it would have been more sensible had they left the spooning and talked matters over first. CHAPTER NINE. "I wonder," mused St. John, stroking Jill's tumbled hair with his right hand, and holding both hers in his left, "why the governor should have come here and told you what he did? It was putting us all in such a false position, and--well, I should have considered it an act altogether beneath him." Jill sighed and nestled unconsciously a little closer to him. "Can't we forget all that for to-day," she asked, "and just think only of our two selves? I quite believe you when you say that you are not engaged to your cousin. I think I believed it all along only I was so horribly jealous. I'm jealous still, jealous that she can see you when I can't, and that she has a right to call you Jack--" "But you have got that right too," he interrupted, "a better right than she has. You will call me Jack, won't you? I call you Jill." She laughed. "Doesn't it put you in mind of the nursery rhyme?" she said. "I never thought of it before." "Yes; let's see, how does it go? We must alter it a little to fit the case, `Jack and Jill went up the hill to--' we can't say `fetch a pail of water.'" "In search of fame together," put in Jill. "Ah, yes! Jack and Jill went up the hill In search of fame together, Jack fell down and broke his crown, And--"