“About ten years after Grandfather and Grandmother King were married, a young man came to visit them.  He was a distant relative of grandmother’s and he was a Poet.  He was just beginning to be famous.  He was very famous afterward.  He came into the orchard to write a poem, and he fell asleep with his head on a bench that used to be under grandfather’s tree.  Then Great-Aunt Edith came into the orchard.  She was not a Great-Aunt then, of course.  She was only eighteen, with red lips and black, black hair and eyes.  They say she was always full of mischief.  She had been away and had just come home, and she didn’t know about the Poet.  But when she saw him, sleeping there, she thought he was a cousin they had been expecting from Scotland.  And she tiptoed up—­so—­and bent over—­so—­and kissed his cheek.  Then he opened his big blue eyes and looked up into Edith’s face.  She blushed as red as a rose, for she knew she had done a dreadful thing.  This could not be her cousin from Scotland.  She knew, for he had written so to her, that he had eyes as black as her own.  Edith ran away and hid; and of course she felt still worse when she found out that he was a famous poet.  But he wrote one of his most beautiful poems on it afterwards and sent it to her—­and it was published in one of his books.”

We had seen it all—­the sleeping genius—­the roguish, red-lipped girl—­the kiss dropped as lightly as a rose-petal on the sunburned cheek.

“They should have got married,” said Felix.

“Well, in a book they would have, but you see this was in real life,” said the Story Girl.  “We sometimes act the story out.  I like it when Peter plays the poet.  I don’t like it when Dan is the poet because he is so freckled and screws his eyes up so tight.  But you can hardly ever coax Peter to be the poet—­except when Felicity is Edith—­and Dan is so obliging that way.”

“What is Peter like?” I asked.

“Peter is splendid.  His mother lives on the Markdale road and washes for a living.  Peter’s father ran away and left them when Peter was only three years old.  He has never come back, and they don’t know whether he is alive or dead.  Isn’t that a nice way to behave to your family?  Peter has worked for his board ever since he was six.  Uncle Roger sends him to school, and pays him wages in summer.  We all like Peter, except Felicity.”

“I like Peter well enough in his place,” said Felicity primly, “but you make far too much of him, mother says.  He is only a hired boy, and he hasn’t been well brought up, and hasn’t much education.  I don’t think you should make such an equal of him as you do.”

Laughter rippled over the Story Girl’s face as shadow waves go over ripe wheat before a wind.

“Peter is a real gentleman, and he is more interesting than you could ever be, if you were brought up and educated for a hundred years,” she said.