Then, as fast as her mischievous little feet could carry her, she raced down one hill and across to the other.

Very stealthily she advanced till she found the boy bent over a puzzle on the back stoop, and--and he was whistling merrily.
"How she teased him then! How she taunted him with 'Heart-broken, indeed--and whistling like that!' In vain he blushed and stammered, and protested that his whistling was only to keep up his spirits.

The girl only laughed and tossed her yellow curls; then she hunted till she found some little jingling bells, and these she tied to the black badge of mourning and pulled it high up on the flagpole.

The next instant she was off with a run and a skip, and a saucy wave of her hand; and the boy was left all alone with an hour's work ahead of him to untie the knots from his desecrated badge of mourning.
"And yet they were wonderfully good friends--this boy and girl.

From the very first, when they were seven and eight, they had said that they would marry each other when they grew up, and always they spoke of it as the expected thing, and laid many happy plans for the time when it should come.