n report. It is known that he made a partial payment of
forty-five cents at a second-hand book-store for a number of
volumes--Grindstaff on Torts and some others--which he had negotiated
on the instalment system; it is also believed that he won twenty-eight
cents playing seven-up in the little room behind Louie Farbach's bar;
but these things are of little import compared to the established fact
that at eleven o'clock he was one of the ball guests at the Pike
Mansion. He took no active part in the festivities, nor was he one of
the dancers: his was, on the contrary, the role of a quiet observer.
He lay stretched at full length upon the floor of the enclosed porch
(one of the strips of canvas was later found to have been loosened),
wedged between the outer railing and a row of palms in green tubs. The
position he occupied was somewhat too draughty to have been recommended
by a physician, but he commanded, between the leaves of the screening
palms, an excellent view of the room nearest the porch. A long window,
open, afforded communication between this room, one of those used for
dancing, and the dim bower which had been made of the veranda, whither
flirtatious couples made their way between the dances.

It was not to play eavesdropper upon any of these that the uninvited
Joe had come. He was not there to listen, and it is possible that, had
the curtains of other windows afforded him the chance to behold the
dance, he might not have risked the dangers of his present position.
He had not the slightest interest in the whispered coquetries that he
heard; he watched only to catch now and then, over the shoulders of the
dancers, a fitful glimpse of a pretty head that flitted across the
window--the amber hair of Mamie Pike. He shivered in the draughts; and
the floor of the porch was cement, painful to elbow and knee, the space
where he lay cramped and narrow; but the golden bubbles of her hair,
the shimmer of her dainty pink dress, and the fluffy wave of her lace
scarf as she crossed and recrossed in a waltz, left him, apparently, in
no discontent. He watched with parted lips, his pale cheeks reddening
whenever those fair glimpses were his. At last she came out to the
veranda with Eugene and sat upon a little divan, so close to Joe that,
daring wildly in the shadow, he reached out a trembling hand and let
his fingers rest upon the end of her scarf, which had fallen from her
shoulders and touched the floor. She sat with