“Gee! it—­it’s swell!”

“And—­”

“Look!  Look!”

“Persimmons!” A golden mound of them lay at the base of a tree, piled up against the hole, bursting, brown.  “Persimmons!  Here; taste one.  They’re fine.”

“Eat ’em?”

“Sure!”

She bit into one gently; then with appetite.  “M-m-m!  Good!”

“Want another?”

“M-m-m—­my mouth!  Ouch!  My m-mouth!”

“Gee! you cute little thing, you!  See, my mouth’s the same way, too.  Feels like a knot.  Gee! you cute little thing, you—­all puckered up and all.”

And linking her arm in his they crunch-crunched over the brittle leaves and up a hillside to a plateau of rock overlooking the flaming country; and from the valley below smoke from burning mounds of leaves wound in spirals, its pungency drifting to them.

“See that tree there?  It’s a oak.  Look; from a little acorn like this it grew.  See, this is a acorn, and in the start that tree wasn’t no bigger than this little thing.”

“Quit your kidding!” But she smiled and her lips were parted sweetly; and always unformed tears would gloze her eyes.

“Here, sit here, little lady.  Wait till I spread this newspaper out.  Gee!  Don’t I wish you didn’t have to go back to the city by two o’clock, little lady!  We could make a great day of it here, out in the country; lunch at a farm and see the sun set and all.  Some day of it we could make if—­”

“I—­I don’t have to go back, Eddie.”

His face expanded into his widest smile.  “Gee! that’s great!  That’s just great!”

Silence.

“What you thinking of, little lady, sitting there so pretty and all?”

“N-nothing.”

“Nothing?  Aw, surely something!”

A tear formed and zigzagged down her cheek.  “Nothing, honest; only I—­I feel right happy.”

“That’s just how you oughtta feel, little lady.”

“In three months, if—­Aw, ain’t I the nut?”

“It’ll be a big Christmas, won’t it, little missy, for both of us?  A big Christmas for both of us; you as sound and round as a peach again, and me shooting up like a skyrocket on the pay-roll.”

A laugh bubbled to her lips before the tear was dry.  “In three months I won’t be a T.B., not even a little bit.”

“’Sh-h-h!  On the farm we wasn’t allowed to say even that.  We wasn’t supposed to even know what them letters mean.”

“Don’t you know what they mean, Eddie?”

“Sure I do!” He leaned toward her and placed his hand lightly over hers.  “T.B.—­True Blue—­that’s what they mean, little lady.”

She could feel the veins in his palm throbbing.

SUMMER RESOURCES

At seven o’clock the Seaside Hotel struggled into full dress—­ladies emerged from siestas and curlpapers, dowagers wormed into straight fronts and spread the spousal vestments of boiled shirt, U-shaped waistcoat et al. across the bed.  Slim young men in the swelter of their inside two-fifty-a-day rooms carefully extracted their braided-at-the-seams trousers from beneath the mattresses and removed trees from patent-leather pumps.