ss up Pig-iron and his limousine to
come home in a flat-wheeled trolley with my hero, who's already made
him sore once? Oh, didn't I though! I guess I'm crazy!"

Cecille recoiled a little from that.

A prize-fighter. A bruiser. A plug-ugly. But--but--why, that wasn't
possible. And if your idea of such a one is what Cecille's once was,
neither will he fill your eye.

Just a kid. Hamilton had hit it off aptly at that. Level-eyed and
diffident of tongue, with only a hint of his hidden bodily perfection
lurking in breadth of shoulder and slenderness of waist.

A prize-fighter! Cecille fell asleep wondering how soon he would come
again. As to whether he would come at all she was never for a moment
in doubt. Once she had watched his eyes follow Felicity across the
room she _knew_. But she hadn't felt sorry for him as Hamilton had.
She felt sorry for herself and bitter against Perry. For the time she
hated him.

Nor did she have to wonder long. Perry came the next night and
escorted Felicity to the Roof. And the next. And next. Then Felicity
realized that it would not be good policy to make Dunham sulk. Indeed
she knew her luck. Indeed she played the game. The third evening she
left Perry at home with Cecille.

[Illustration: Lucky interference.]

And for six whole weeks Broadway nudged and watched it. Broadway
watched Perry Blair's courtship of Felicity and Dunham's, if you can
call the latter's unhurried pursuit that. Dunham was complacent and
patient, Felicity's tactics were not new to him and he did not mind
being made conspicuous. And Perry Blair never knew they nudged; never
knew they laughed. There is some satisfaction in that. But it is far
finer, I think, to be sure that Broadway never guessed at all of the
other courtship which went steadily forward in the same interval,
elementally, naturally as willows bud in spring. Perry himself was
unaware of it. Cecille too--for a while.

For Felicity left him oftener and oftener to the other girl. And
almost immediately a common need for the companionship of the other was
born in both of them. Upon the boy's part it must have been the urge
to carry on his courtship, even vicariously. Lonesomeness was the way
Cecille explained it to herself until with the passage of a little time
she could no longer tell herself that lie and believe it. And that
marked the beginning of a long bad period for her.

She ceased soon to hate him when he spok