She pondered the matter for a dozen steps, swinging her hat at her side and looking away across the housetops to the mountains.  She did not know any other man who would have said that in just that way.  The words were frank; all sincerity; that is, nothing lay behind them.  Archie and Teddy, any of her boy friends in town—­they knew all about girls!  Or thought that they did.  Mr. Gratton with his smooth way; he led her to suppose that he had been giving girls a great deal of studious thought for many years, and that only after this thorough investigation did he feel in a position to declare herself to be the most wonderful of her sex.

“Don’t you like girls?” she asked.  For once she wasn’t “fishing”; she wanted to know.

“Of course I do,” he told her heartily.  “As well as a man can—­under the circumstances.”

“You mean not knowing them better?” When he nodded she looked up at him again, hesitated, and then demanded:  “You like me, don’t you?”

As the question popped out she understood even more clearly than before that Mark King was utterly different from her various “men friends.”  She had never asked a man that before; she was not accustomed to employing either that direct method or matter-of-fact tone.  Just now there was no hint of the coquette in her; she was just a very grave-eyed girl, as serious in her tete-a-tete with an interesting male as she could have been were she sixty years old.  And she was concerned with his answer; already she knew that he had a way of being very direct and straight from the shoulder.

“Of course I do,” he said heartily, a little surprised by the abruptness of the question and yet without hesitation.  “Very much.”

She flushed prettily; she, Gloria Gaynor, flushed up because Mark King said in blunt, unvarnished fashion:  “I like you very much.”  The grave sobriety went out of her eyes; they shone happily.  When they reached the “funny little store” she was humming a snatch of a bright little waltz tune.  And she was thinking, without putting the thought into words:  “And I like you very much.  You are quite the most splendid man I ever saw.”

King laughed over Gloria’s order.  Some bars of sweetened chocolate, a bag of cookies with stale frosting in pink and white, a diminutive tin of sardines, and two bottles of soda-water.

“Fine,” he chuckled, “as far as it goes.  Now we’ll complete the larder.  A small coffee-pot, handful of coffee, a tin of condensed milk, a dime’s worth of sugar, can of corned beef, block of butter, loaf of bread, two tin cups.  Your marketing,” he grinned at her, “we’ll have for dessert.”

“I didn’t know,” countered Gloria, making a face at him, “that I was entertaining a starved wild man for lunch.”

“You’ll eat your half, I’ll bet, and be ready for more a long time before we get home.”

Gloria, impatient to be on the homeward trail, assumed command in a way which delighted King; he glimpsed the fact that she had always had her way and was thoroughly accustomed to the issuance of orders which were to be obeyed; further, he found her little way of Princess Gloria entirely captivating:  already she was bullying him as all of her life she had bullied his old friend Ben.