and, honest, she hadn't realized
she was doing anythin' dishon'able, but Heye is such an old pest";
which was an excuse for her weeping on his shoulder and his kissing
the tears away.

All day he looked forward to their meetings. Yet constantly the law of
the adventurer, which means the instinct of practical decency, warned
him that this was no amour for him; that he must not make love where
he did not love; that this good-hearted vulgarian was too kindly to
tamper with and too absurd to love. Only----And again his breath would
draw in with swift exultation as he recalled how elastic were her
shoulders to stroke.

It was summer now, and they were back in Virginia, touring the Eastern
Shore. Carl, the prairie-born, had been within five miles of the open
Atlantic, though he had not seen it. Along the endless flat
potato-fields, broken by pine-groves under whose sultry shadow negro
cabins sweltered, the heat clung persistently. The show-tent was
always filled with a stale scent of people.

At the town of Nankiwoc the hotel was not all it might have been.
Evelyn L'Ewysse announced that she was "good and sick of eating a
vaudeville dinner with the grub acts stuck around your plate in a lot
of birds' bath-tubs--little mess of turnips and a dab of spinach and a
fried cockroach. And when it comes to sleeping another night on a bed
like a gridiron, no--thank--_you_! And believe me, if I see that old
rube hotel-keeper comb his whiskers at the hall hat-rack again--he
keeps a baby comb in his vest pocket with a lead-pencil and a cigar
some drummer gave him--if I have to watch him comb that alfalfa again
I'll bite his ears off and get pinched by the S. P. C. A.!"

With Mrs. Lubley, the old lady and complacent unofficial chaperon of
the show, Eve was going to imitate Carl and the two bandsmen, and
sleep in the dressing-room tent, over half of which was devoted to the
women of the company.

Every day Carl warned himself that he must go no farther, but every
night as Eve and he parted, to sleep with only a canvas partition
between them, he cursed the presence of the show chaperon, and of the
two bandsmen, always distressingly awake and talking till after
midnight.

A hot June night. The whole company had been invited to a dance at the
U. C. V. Hall; the two bandsmen were going; the chaperon--lively old
lady with experience on the burlesque circuit--was gaily going. Carl
and Eve were not. It had taken but one glance between them