"Hope you won't mind the smacking much. Besides, it would be somefing else if it wasn't this," he continued, mimicking a childish lisp he had never forgotten.
"Miss Lupton!"
A fugitive memory flashed across her mind. What she saw was this: a glassy sea after sunset, the cheerful life on the deck of an ocean liner, a little girl playing at--at--why, at selling stars of her own manufacture. The picture began to take form. A boy came into it, and vaguely other figures. She recalled impending punishment, intervention, two children snuggled beneath a steamer rug, and last the impulsive kiss of a little girl determined to exact the last morsel of joy before retribution fell.
"Are you that boy?" she asked, eyes wide open and burning.
"It's harder to believe you're that long-legged little fairy in white socks."
"So you knew me ... all the time ... and I didn't know you at all."
Her voice trembled. The look she flung toward him was shy and diffident. She had loved him then. She loved him now. Somehow he was infinitely nearer to her than he had been.
"Yes, I knew you. I've always known you. That's because you're a dream friend of mine. In the daytime I've had other things to think about, but at night you're a great pal of mine."
"You mean ... before ... we met again?"
"That's what I mean."
The pink surged into her cheeks. "I've dreamed about you too," she confessed with an adorable shyness. "How strange it is--to meet again after all these years."
"Not strange to me. Somehow I expected to meet you. Wasn't that in your dreams too--that some day we should meet again?"
"I was always meeting you. But--why didn't I know you?"
"I'll confess that I wouldn't have known you if it hadn't been for your name."
"You think I've changed, then?"
"No, you haven't changed. You've only grown up. You're still a little rebel. Sometimes you still think it's howwid to be a dirl."
"Only when they won't let me do things," she smiled. "And you really remember even my lisp."
"You have a faint hint of it yet sometimes when you are excited."
"I'm excited now--tremendously." She laughed to belie her words, but the note of agitation was not to be concealed. Her mouth was strangely dry and her heart had a queer uncertain beat. "Why shouldn't I be--with my baby days popping out at me like this when I thought they were dead and buried? It's ... it's the strangest thing...."
His blood too responded to a quickened beat. He could not understand the reason for it. Since he had no intention of being sentimental he was distinctly annoyed at himself. If it had been Joyce Seldon now--well, that would have been another tale.