Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/26

 him wipe his sticky fingers on her handkerchief. "You haven't remembered yours," she apologized for him.

"Oh," he said, "boys don't ever have them."

She thought the matter over. She said: "You can always borrow mine."

It was so delicately put that, with a masculine obtuseness, he did not get her meaning. It was Miss Margaret's surrender.

She was visiting the next-door neighbours; and Don and she, during the two weeks that followed their meeting, were together constantly. He deserted his cousins, and she left the youngsters with whom she had been playing. She learned to storm block-forts with battalions of coloured marbles that were cavalry at one moment and cannon balls at the next; to make siege guns of cuts of elderberry bush bored of their pith; and to lay out a national cemetery for lead soldiers with dominoes for gravestones. When she came to the game of imprisoned princess, she was already more than a pupil, and she dictated the behaviour of the regal beauty in a way which Don could not follow. She insisted that the prince should die of his wounds—after he had killed ten dragons and the ogre—and leave the princess to weep out the eyes of her youth beside his tomb. Don could see no right fun in that, and her contempt was galling. They compromised by agreeing to give the game a tragic ending every third time they played it; and he consented to the substitution of a little china doll for the "Noah's wife," shaped like a blue hourglass, which he had always used as the imprisoned beauty.