She put both hands on his big, panting chest and pushed him backward
towards the house. "You're good enough for anybody, and if I wasn't so
young and daren't leave mother till I get my wisdom-teeth cut, and till
I'm thirty-seven--oh, oh, oh!" She laughed till the tears came into her
eyes. "This is as good as--as a play."

"It's the best acted play I ever saw, from 'Ten Nights in a Bar-room' to
'Struck Oil,'" rejoined Jesse Bulrush, with a face still half ashamed yet
beaming. "But, tell me, you heartless little woman, are the verses worth
anything? Do you think she'll like them?"

Kitty grew suddenly serious, and a curious look he could not read
deepened in her eyes. "Nurse 'll like them--of course she will," she
said gently. "She'll like them because they are you. Read them to her
as you read them to me, and she'll only hear your voice, and she'll think
them clever and you a wonderful man, even if you are fifty and weigh a
thousand pounds. It doesn't matter to a woman what a man's saying or
doing, or whether he's so much cleverer than she is, if she knows that
under everthing he's saying, 'I love you.' A man isn't that way, but a
woman is. Now go." Again she pushed him with a small brown hand.

"Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" he said admiringly.

"Then be a father to me," she said teasingly.

"I can't marry both your mother and nurse."

"P'r'aps you can't marry either," she replied sarcastically, "and I know
that in any case you'll never be any relative of mine by marriage. Get