listener, and he was a prodigious talker--was it not all appropriate?

One day he went searching for Kitty at her favourite retreat, a little
knoll behind and to the left of the house, where a half-dozen trees made
a pleasant resting-place at a fine look-out point. He found her in her
usual place, with a look almost pensive on her face. He did not notice
that, for he was excited and elated.

"I want to read you something I've written," he said, and he drew from
his pocket a paper.

"If it's another description of the timber-land you have for sale-please,
not to me," she answered provokingly, for she guessed well what he held
in his hand. She had seen him writing it. She had even seen some of the
lines scrawled and re-scrawled on bits of paper, showing careful if not
swift and skillful manufacture. One of these crumpled-up bits of paper
she had in her pocket now, having recovered it that she might tease him
by quoting the lines at a provoking opportunity.

"It's not that. It's some verses I've written," he said, with a wave of
his hand.

"All your own?" she asked with an air of assumed innocent interest, and
he did not see the frivolous gleam in her eyes, or notice the touch of
aloes on her tongue.

"Yes. Yes. I've always written verses more or less--I write a good many
advertisements in verse," he added cheerfully. "They are very popular.
Not genius, quite, but there it is, the gift; and it has its uses in
commerce as in affairs of the heart. But if you'd rather not, if it