take me?" Willy Cameron's
chivalrous soul was suddenly shocked. To his horror he saw tears in Miss
Boyd's eyes.

"I'm just a plain idiot, Miss Edith," he said. "I was only fooling. It
will mean a lot to me to have a nice girl go with me to the movies, or
anywhere else. We'll make it to-night, if that suits you, and I'll take
a look through the neighborhood at noon and see what's worth while."

The Eagle Pharmacy was a small one in a quiet neighborhood. During the
entire day, and for three evenings a week, Mr. William Wallace Cameron
ran it almost single-handed, having only the preoccupied assistance of
Miss Boyd in the candy and fancy goods. At the noon and dinner hours,
and four evenings a week, he was relieved by the owner, Mr. Davis, a
tired little man with large projecting ears and worried, child-like
eyes, who was nursing an invalid wife at home. A pathetic little man,
carrying home with unbounded faith day after day bottles of liquid foods
and beef capsules, and making wistful comments on them when he returned.

"She couldn't seem to keep that last stuff down, Mr. Cameron," he would
say. "I'll try something else."

And he would stand before his shelves, eyes upturned, searching,
eliminating, choosing.

Miss Boyd attended to the general merchandise, sold stationery and
perfumes, candy and fancy soaps, and in the intervals surveyed the world
that lay beyond the plate glass windows with shrewd, sophisticated young
eyes.

"That new doctor across the street is getting busier," she would say.
Or, "The people in 42 have got a Ford. They haven't got room for a
garage, either. Probably have to leave it out at nights."

Her sophistication was kindly in the main. She combined it with an easy
tolerance of weakness, and an invincible and cheery romanticism, as
Willy Cameron discovered the night they first went to a moving picture
theater together. She frankly wept and joyously laughed, and now and
then, delighted at catching some film subtlety and fearful that he would
miss it, she would nudge him with her elbow.

"What d'you think of that?" she would say. "D'you get it? He thinks he's
getting her--Alice Joyce, you know--on the telephone, and it's a private
wire to the gang." She was rather quiet after that particular speech.
Then she added: "I know a place that's got a secret telephone." But he
was absorbed in the picture, and made no comment on that. She seemed
rather relieved.

Once or twice she placed an excite