d of approaching footsteps
the guitar grew suddenly silent and a slight, rather colorless girl in a
white dress, with a white flower in her fluffy blonde hair, came from
out the shadow of the microphilla rose that embowered the porch and
stood in the full light of the moon, giving him greeting.

"Oh, I'm so glad to see you, Eddie," she said. "All of the family but me
have gone to a party, and I'm so lonesome! Besides, I, like everybody
else in town, want a chance to congratulate you."

"Congratulate?" he replied, with a shrug, as he took a seat beside her,
under the roses, "Congratulate? In their hearts they all despise me."
Then with a smile,

"You see the blue devils have the upper hand of me tonight, Myra."

"Well, they are fibbing devils if they tell you you are despised. Dick
Ambler was over at your house looking for you a little while ago, and he
stopped by and told me about your swim. He said he and the other boys
that followed you in the boat had never seen anything so exciting in
their lives. They were expecting you to give out any minute and so much
afraid that if you did you would go under before they could get hold of
you. When you won the wager they were so proud and happy that they were
almost beside themselves."

"Oh, I know Dick and the rest are the best and truest friends a fellow
ever had--bless their hearts--but they are the exceptions."

"Nonsense! There's not a boy in town tonight who would not give his
head to be in your shoes, and" (shyly) "the girls are all wild about
you."

The hero smiled indulgently. No woman was ever thrown with Edgar Poe,
from his birth up, but in some fashion or degree, loved him, and to him
all women were angels. He never, as boy or man, entertained a thought or
wrote a line of one of them that was not reverent. He admired, in
varying degree, all types of feminine loveliness, but Myra, though he
liked her, was not the style that he most cared for. He had always
thought her too "washed out." The soul that shone through her rather
prominent, light-blue eyes was too transparent, too easily read. He
found more interesting the richer-hued brunette type, and the complex
nature that goes with it; the flashes of starlight, the softness and the
warmth, of brown eyes; the mysteries that lie in the shadow of dusky
lashes; the variety of rich, warm tones in chestnut and auburn tresses.

But Myra was a revelation to him tonight. He had never dreamed that she
could look so pret