“What kind of branches?” queried Norma.

“Oh, science, and physics, but specially entomology and forestry.  He’s in government service, you know.”

“He doesn’t act a bit important or dignified, does he?” Norma said thoughtfully.  “You’d almost think he was a sort of grown-up boy.”

“I wish I knew all he does.  It’s mighty nice for a fellow to have a friend like Stanley.  It’s like being a little bicycle running in the track of a speeding motorcycle.  You may not be able to keep up, but it’s mighty good exercise trying to hit the pace.”

Kit was walking behind the others with Amy and Anne.  Now that they had joined the others, and the girls were talking about Stanley also, she had become strangely silent.

“You don’t know him very well, do you?” Amy asked, curiously.  “I mean, he isn’t related to you.”

Kit shook her head with bland indifference.

“He’s a friend of Billie’s.  I only met him down east when he came to chase the gypsy moth in Gilead.”

She did not add that with Shad’s help and able cooperation, she had managed to curtail the chase of the gypsy moth, temporarily, by holding the chaser captive in the family corn-crib, but she inwardly suspected that Stanley was remembering it.  Every once in a while she accidentally caught him looking at her, with a look of amused, interested retrospection that made her vaguely uncomfortable.

As they left the campus, Norma, leading with Billie, took the street that led to the bluffs overlooking the lake, and somehow or other in the subsequent scramble down the narrow pathways, Kit found Stanley at her elbow.  Even Jean could not have been more dignified or distant in her manner, but Stanley refused to be frozen out.

“You know,” he said, genially, “I’ve just found out something, Miss Kit.  I forgave you long ago for locking me up in your corn-crib, and nearly landing me in the local calaboose, but you don’t forgive me one bit for trespassing in your berry patch.”

Kit’s profile tilted ever so slightly heavenward.  Jean had loved to quote to her in the old days that consistency was a jewel, and William of Avon had said so positively, whereupon Kit would swing always, feeling herself backed by Emerson’s opinion that “consistency was a hobgoblin of little minds.”  Yet now she felt herself feeling almost righteously consistent.  She had thoroughly made up her mind that very day when Mr. Hicks made his memorable and fruitless journey to Greenacres that not even government experts had any right to climb over fences into people’s private property without first asking permission.  Perhaps the sudden popularity of the trespasser with all the other members of the family had something to do with Kit’s stand against him.  Even Helen had remarked that she didn’t see how on earth Kit could ever have imagined a person looking like Mr. Howard could be a berry hooker.

“I don’t want you to forgive me,” she said, calmly.  “I’ve never been one bit sorry for it.  I think you ought to have come up to the house and asked permission to go in there.  And you never said that you were sorry.  It always seemed to me as if you rather acted as if you thought it was a good joke”—­she hesitated a moment, before adding pointedly,—­“on me.”