“It looks good to me,” was Ellison’s inward comment as he walked up the street again.  “I think I ’ll look into this fruit business.  That would give me an out-door life, and there seems to be money in it.  That’s a neat cottage of Dr. Millner’s.  I ’ll walk past and look at the grounds.  Hello, here comes that Chinee Kid—­what ’d she call him?  Wing, wasn’t it?  Queer-looking little critter, but she seemed to like him.  Hello, Wing!  Where are you flying to now?  Got over your bumps yet?”

But the Chinee Kid cast one sober, stupid look at Ellison’s sociable countenance, opened his mouth just wide enough to grunt “No sabe,” and hurried on.

Ellison looked after him with a foolish little smile and exclaimed aloud, “Well, I ’ll be hanged!  If that is n’t a kid!”

He heard the sound of a girl’s laugh, and turning quickly, saw a merry face surrounded by golden-red hair disappearing from a window of the Millner cottage.  He blushed furiously, frowned and muttered an angry little word, as he thought, “That kid needs to be spanked.”  But, although he was smarting a little with the feeling that the boy had made him seem ridiculous in her eyes, his glance covertly searched her windows as he walked on, hoping for another glimpse of the girlish figure and the glowing hair.

A year went by, and Ellison, brown and athletic-looking, was building a pretty cottage on the crest of a gently sloping hill just outside the town.  Annie Millner, wearing a new ring and carrying a great happiness in her heart, went often to see how the cottage was progressing and how the trees were growing.  For the hill-slope was covered with the gray-green of young olive trees, the dense, dark foliage of young oranges, and the stunted, scraggy boughs of the Japanese persimmon.  His fruit ranch promised well, the day for their bridal was set, and they were hopeful, glad, and happy.

But Wing was the young man’s implacable enemy.  He neither forgot nor forgave the shaking he had received at their first meeting, and he revenged himself for it as much as lay in his small power whenever he found opportunity.  He succeeded occasionally in making Ellison look foolish in his own eyes; and he, in consequence, disliked the child and disapproved of the universal petting that was given him.  It particularly annoyed him that Annie showed his small enemy so much favor, and he would sometimes think angrily, when irritated by some trick of the Chinee Kid, that if she had more regard for his feelings she would not join in the general encouragement that was given to the heathen brat in being a public nuisance.

As for Wing, if he had known, or could have understood what happiness his childish sport had been instrumental in bringing to these two people, it is probable that his antipathy to Ellison would have extended even to Annie, whom, as it was, he considered one of his best friends.  But he could not know, nor could they, that he was their kismet and that his small brown hands wound and unwound, tangled and straightened, the threads of their lives.