“Well, if he’s as witty as that in your album, it will be to mask a bleeding heart.  I happen to know that in a former existence he was never even asked to write, though he always hoped he might be.”

“I’m sorry if you like him, Uncle Maje, but I’m positive that Fatty Budlow is not a boy I could ever feel deeply for.  I don’t believe our acquaintance will even ripen into friendship,” and she looked with profound eyes into the wondrous, opening future.

“Of course it won’t,” I said.  “I might have known that.  He will continue through the ages to be an impossible boy.  Miss Lansdale feels the same way about him.  Poor Fatty or Horsehead or whatever they call him stands off and glares at her, and can’t say his lesson when he catches her eye—­only he seldom does catch it, because she’s so busy with other boys of more spirit who crowd about her and snatch hair ribbons and sing ’My lady sleeps’ until no one else can.”

“Do you know Fatty Budlow?” asked my surprised woman child of Miss Lansdale.  But that young woman only reached out one foot to point its toe idly at a creeping green worm and turn its vagrant course.  The toe was by no means common-sense, and the heel was simply idiotic.

“Of course she knows him,” I said; “she knows he would give his right hand for her, which is a good deal under the circumstances, and she very properly despises him for it.  She’d take her picture away from him if she could.”

“She wouldn’t,” said Miss Lansdale, with a gesture of her foot that disconcerted me.

“Miss Kate,” I said, “I have lived my life in terror of seeing one of those squashy green worms meet a fearful disaster in my presence.  Would you mind—­”

With a fillip of the bronzed toe she sent the amazed worm into a country that must have been utterly strange to it,

“She’d take it back quickly enough if she knew what he makes of it,” I said, returning to the picture; “if she knew that he had kept it ever since he learned that agriculture, mining, and ship-building are principal industries—­only at first it had two long yellow braids, and tassels dangling from its boot tops.”

“My mother had beautiful long golden hair,” said the woman child, adding simply, “papa says mine is just like it.”

Miss Lansdale regarded me narrowly.

“You get me all mixed up,” she said.

“I like to.  You’re heady then—­like your mother’s punch when it’s ’all mixed up.’”

“I must put in more ice,” remarked Miss Lansdale, calmly.

“Fatty Budlow is so serious,” said the woman child, suspecting that the talk had drifted away from her.

“It’s his curse,” I admitted.  “If he weren’t an A No. 1 dreamer, he’d be too serious to live, but be goes dreaming and maundering along—­dreaming that things are about as he would like to have them.  He sees your face and Miss Lansdale’s, and then they get mixed up in a queer way, and Miss Kate’s face comes out of the picture with such a look in the eyes that a man of ordinary spirit would call her ‘Little Miss’ right off without ever stopping to think; but of course this Fatty or Horsehead or whatever it is can’t say it right out, so he says it to himself about twenty-three or twenty-four thousand times a day, as nearly as he can reckon—­he always was weak in arithmetic.”