o forlorn and unconsidered people, to the kind of folk
that nobody else had time to bother about.

"What a mess of a face, poor kiddy!" said the Tyro to himself.

From the mess came another sniffle and then a gurgle. The Tyro, with a
lithe movement of his body, slipped aside from his position of vantage,
and the pressure of the crowd brought the girl against the rail.
Thereupon the Seven Saltatory Devils possessing the frame of the frantic
and fashionable dock-dancer deserted it, yielding place to a demon of
vocality.

"I think he's calling to you," said the Tyro in the girl's ear.

The girl shook her head with a vehemence which imparted not so much
denial as an "I-don't-care-if-he-is" impression.

Stridently sounded the voice of distress from the pier. "Pilot-boat," it
yelled, and repeated it. "Pilot! Pilot! Come--back--pilot-boat."

Again the girl shook her head, this time so violently that her
hair--soft, curly, luxuriant hair--loosened and clouded about her
forehead and ears. In a voice no more than a husky, tremulous whisper,
which was too low even to be intended to carry across the widening
water-space, and therefore manifestly purposed for the establishment of
her own conviction, she said:

"I wo-won't. I _won't_. I WON'T!!!" At the third declaration she brought
a saber-edged heel down square upon the most afflicted toe of a very
sore foot which the Tyro had been nursing since a collision in the
squash court some days previous. Involuntarily he uttered a cry of
anguish, followed by a monosyllabic quotation from the original
Anglo-Saxon. The girl turned upon him a baleful face, while the
long-distance conversationalist on the dock reverted to his original
possession and faded from sight in a series of involuted spasms.

"_What_ did you say?" she demanded, still in that hushed and catchy
voice.

"'Hell,'" repeated the Tyro, in a tone of explication, "'is paved with
good intentions.' It's a proverb."

"I know that as well as you do," she whispered resentfully. "But what
has that to do with--with me?"

"Lord! What a vicious little spitfire it is," said he to himself. Then,
aloud: "It was my good intention to remove that foot and substitute the
other one, which is better able to sustain--"

"Was that your foot I stepped on?"

"It _was_. It is now a picturesque and obsolete ruin."

"It had no right to be there."

"But that's where I've always kept it," he protested, "right at the end
of that leg."