Pocket Island | Page 9

eyes. And how glad he is to fill her pail with berries which he has picked, and when the sun is almost down how charming it is to walk home with her along the maple-shaded lane! He even hopes that he will see another snake so that he can kill that also, and show her how brave a boy is. But no more snakes come to his aid that day and only the gentlest of breezes rustles the spreading boughs that shade their pathway. When she thanks him at parting, a little look of gratitude makes her blue eyes seem more tender than ever to him and her voice sound like sweetest music.
His world has enlarged wonderfully now, for Liddy has entered into it.
CHAPTER V.
THE BOY'S FIRST PARTY.
The Stillman girls were going to give a party, and the boy was invited. It was the first social recognition he had ever received, and it disturbed his equilibrium. It also made him feel that he was almost a man.
He had for some time longed to be a man, and for a year past had felt hurt when called a boy. When the little note of invitation, requesting "the pleasure of your company," etc., reached him, he felt he had suddenly grown taller. He realized it more fully that night when he tried on his best clothes to see how they would look. The sleeves of his jacket were too short and his pants missed connections with his boots by full two inches. The gap seemed to swell the size of his feet, also. When he looked in his little mirror he noticed a plainly defined growth of down on his lip, and his hair needed cutting.
Then the invitation filled him with mingled fear, surprise and pleasure. He hardly knew, after thinking it all over, whether he wanted to go or not. The one fact that turned the scale was Liddy. He was sure she would be there. But then, that painful gap between his pants and boots! He had thought a good deal about her ever since school was over. Now that he was invited to a party where she would be, he began to feel just a little afraid of her.
When the important evening came and he presented himself at the Stillmans' house, and lifted the big iron knocker on the front door, its clang sounded loud enough to wake the dead, and his heart was going like a trip-hammer. Mary Stillman met him at the door, and her welcome was so cordial he couldn't understand it. He wasn't much used to society. All his schoolmates were there--boys that he had played ball, snared suckers, and gone in swimming with scores of times, and girls that seemed a good deal taller than when they went to school. Most of them were dressed in white, and with their rosy cheeks and bright eyes made a pretty picture.
They were nearly all in one of the big front rooms, and among them was Liddy, in pink muslin with a broad sash, and bows of blue ribbon at the ends of her two braids of hair. She looked so sweet he was more afraid of her than ever. His first thought was to go into the room where some of the boys were, but Mary Stillman almost pushed him into the other room and he felt that he was in for it. When he sat down next to another boy and looked at the girls whispering and giggling together, he almost wished he had not come. Then when he thought of that unfriendly separation of his pants and boots he was sure of it. But he caught a pleasant smile and nod from Liddy, and that gave him a world of courage.
Then he began to talk to the boy next to him, and was just beginning to forget that he was at a party, in an exchange of experiences about bee hunting and finding wild honey, when the oldest Stillman girl proposed they play button. He had never played button and wasn't anxious to, for it might necessitate his walking about the room and expose that gap still more. He preferred to talk bee-hunting with Jim Pratt. He was soon made to realize, however, that there was a different sort of wild honey to be gathered at a party, and "Button, button, who's got the button?" was the method. When it came his turn to pay a forfeit, he was directed to measure three yards of tape with Liddy. As this consisted in kneeling face to face with her on a cushion in the center of the room, joining hands, expanding arms to the limit, and back again, punctuating each outward stretch with a kiss, it wasn't so bad. He was sorry it wasn't six