ever, you shall seek in vain in future years for Richard Carr
Pendleton.

"_One_, two, three! _Reverse_, two, three!"

The whistle shrilled.

"Ready for the two-step, children?"

A mild tolerance grew on him. If dancing must be, better the two-step
than anything else. It is not an alluring dance, your two-step; it does
not require temperament. Any one with a firm intention of keeping the
time and a strong arm can drag a girl through it very acceptably.

Dicky skirted the row of mothers and aunts cautiously.

"Oh, look! Did you ever see anything so sweet?" said somebody.
Involuntarily he turned. There in a corner, all by herself, a little
girl was gravely performing a dance. He stared at her curiously.

She was ethereally slender, brown-eyed, brown-haired, brown-skinned. A
little fluffy white dress spread fan-shaped over her knees; her ankles
were bird-like. Her eyes were serious, her hair hung loose. She swayed
lightly; one little gloved hand held out her skirt, the other marked the
time. Her performance was an apotheosis of the two-step; that metronomic
dance would not have recognized itself under her treatment.

Dicky admired. But the admiration of his sex is notoriously fatal to the
art that attracts it. He advanced and bowed jerkily, grasped one of the
loops of her sash in the back, stamped gently a moment to get the time,
and the artist sank into the partner, the pirouette grew coarse to
sympathize with clay.

"Don't they do it well, though! See those little things near the door!"
he caught as they went by, and his heart swelled with pride.

"What's your name?" he asked abruptly after the dance.

"Thithelia," she lisped. She was very shy.

"Mine's Richard Carr Pendleton. My father's a lawyer. What's yours?"

"I--I don't know!"

"Pooh!" he said, grandly; "I guess you know. Don't you, really?"

She shook her head. Suddenly a light dawned in her eyes.

"Maybe I know," she murmured. "I gueth I know. He--he'th a really
thtate!"

"A really state? That isn't anything--nothing at all. A really state?"
He frowned at her. Her lip quivered. She turned and ran away.

"Here, come back!" he called; but she was gone.

"That will do for to-day," said Miss Dorothy, presently, and they surged
into the dressing-rooms, to be buttoned up and pulled out of draughts
and trundled home.

She was swathed carefully in a wadded silk jacket, and then enveloped in
a hooded cloak; she looked like an angelic brownie. Dicky