“Maybe he will—­maybe he will,” she said.  “I was afraid I let him see too plain that I was a fool about him, but some men like that, I reckon; he always seemed to come oftener.  Harriet, one thing has worried the life nearly out of me.  I heard Frank Hansard say a young man never would think as much of a girl after she let him kiss her.  I’m no hypocrite—­I’m anything else; but as much as I’d love to have a young man I cared for kiss me, I’d die in my tracks before I’d let ’im put his arm around me if I thought it would make ’im think less of me.  Do you reckon” (she was avoiding Harriet’s eyes)—­“do you think that would make any difference with Toot—­I mean, with any young man?”

Harriet smiled in spite of the look of gravity in Hettie’s eyes.

“Some men might be that way,” she finally said, consolingly—­she was thinking of the innate coarseness of Hettie’s lover—­“but I don’t think Mr. Wambush is.  That was one of the first things my mother ever taught me.  She told me she’d learned it by experience when she was a girl.  I don’t pretend to be better than other girls, but I’ve always made men keep their distance.”

Hettie shrugged her shoulders, as if to throw off some unpleasant idea.

“Oh, I don’t care.  I’d do it over again.  Lord, I couldn’t help it.  I love him so, and he is so sweet and good when he tries to be.  He thinks I’m all right, too, in some ways.  He says I’m just the girl to marry a dare-devil like he is.  Did you ever know it was me that helped get him away from the revenue men the night he had a barrel o’ whiskey on his wagon?” Hettie laughed impulsively, and her graceful little body shook all over.

“Mother thought you had a hand in it,” answered Harriet, with an appreciative smile.

“It was fun,” giggled Hettie.  “Toot drove nipitytuck down the street from the Hawkbill as fast as he could lick it, and them a-gallopin’ after ‘im.  I had been on the front porch talkin’ to his father, who was anxious about ’im and wanted to see ’im.  Toot pulled up at the side gate an’ said:  ’No use, Het, damn it; I can’t make it, and they’ll know my horse and wagon an’ prove it on me.’  Then I thought what to do; the men wasn’t in sight back there in the woods.  Quicker ’n lightnin’, I made Toot push the whiskey across the porch into the kitchen an’ shet the door, an’ when the revenue men stopped at the gate Toot was settin’ up as cool as a cucumber in his wagon talkin’ to me over the fence.  I think he was asking me to get in the wagon and go out home with him.  I never seed—­saw ’im so scared, though, in my life; but la me! it was fun to me, an’ I had more lies on my tongue ’n a dog has fleas.

“‘Did you have a barrel on that wagon a minute ago?’ one of the two men asked.

“‘What’n the hell are you talkin’ about?’ asked Toot.  ’I haven’t seed—­seen no barrel.’” Hettie was trying to speak correctly, but the spirit of the narrative ran away with her meagre ideas of grammar.