The Penalty. Gouverneur Morris

she added: "There are moments!"

      "Thank you," he said gravely, and then with a kind of wistful gallantry: "Could I kiss the dear for luck?"

      She turned her cheek to him bravely and frankly like a child. His lips touched it lightly, making no sound.

      Far off in the native jungle the cave-man moaned, and shut his eyes and turned his face to the wall of his cave. The medicine-man came, examined him, and said that he was about to die of a new disease. He looked very wise and called it "predatory inanition."

      As for the cave-girl, having run and run and run, she pulled up in a flowery glade, looked behind, listened, saw nothing, heard no sound of painfully pursuing feet, and called herself a fool and a silly for having run. She wanted to explain that she hadn't meant to run away, that girls never really meant what they said, and would the cave-man please recover at once from his predatory inanition and take notice of her again?

      "Come," said Barbara, after quite a long silence, "let's go forth and collar a taxi. Anywhere I can take you? I can't ask you to lunch, because I am having seven maidens, and afterward Victor Polideon to teach us to turkey-trot."

      "I wouldn't be afraid of seven devils," Wilmot urged in his own behalf, "if you were present."

      "There are only two," she said practically, "and they are very little devils. But I won't let you come, because you would have much too good a time." Then she relented. "Come later, about three, and teach me to turkey-trot. You do it better than Polideon. And I hate to have him touch me."

      "That's something," he exclaimed triumphantly.

      "What's something?"

      "That you don't hate for me to touch you."

      She laughed and tapped his shoulder in rag-time. Also she whistled, and did a quiet suspicion of a turkey-trot with her feet.