for a quarter
of an hour, and was happy. Once he looked--not exactly looked; perhaps
peeked is the better word; took just the tiniest lightning peek out of
the tail of his eye, and found a smile waiting for him. At supper, if
any one save Piggy had tried to take a chair by his Heart's Desire
when the plates came around, there would have been a fight. Mealy
Jones knew this, and he knew what Piggy did not know, that it would
have been a fight of two against one. So Piggy sat bolt upright in his
chair beside the black-and-red checked dress, and talked to the room
at large; but he spoke no word to the maiden at his side. She noticed
that Piggy kept dropping his knife, and the solicitude of her sex
prompted her to ask: "Are your hands cold, Winfield?"

And the instinct of his sex to hide a fault with a falsehood made
Piggy nod his head.

Then she answered: "Cold hands, a warm heart!"

At this important bit of repartee, the King of Boyville so forgot his
royal dignity that he let an orange-peel drive at Jimmy Sears, and
pretended not to hear her. His only reply was to joggle her arm when
she reached for the cake. Piggy was so exuberant and in such high
spirits that he put his plate on his chair and made Bud Perkins walk
turkey fashion three times around the room. He forgot the disgrace
which his note had brought to him in the school; he forgot the
pretensions of Mealy Jones; he did not wish to forget the episode of
the apple-tree, and for the time Piggy Pennington lived in a most
peculiar world, made of hazel eyes and red-ribboned pig-tails, all
circling around on a background of black-and-red checked flannel.

[Illustration: _At this important bit of repartee_.]

After that nothing mattered very much. It didn't matter that Piggy's
bruised feet began to sting like fire. It didn't matter much if Mealy
Jones's mother did come for him with a lantern and break up the party.
It didn't matter if Jimmy Sears did call out, "Hello, Roses Red," when
the boys reached the bed-room where their hats were; for a voice that
Piggy knew cried back from the adjoining room, "You think you're cute,
don't you, old smarty?" Nothing in the world could matter then, for
had not Piggy Pennington five minutes before handed a card to his
Heart's Desire which read:

_If I may not C U home
may I not sit on the fence
and C U go by_?

And had not she taken it, and said merrily, "I'm going to keep this"?
What could matter after that o