er finger-tips and blew along them delicately.

"Gone--like that," she finished.

Sometimes Willy Cameron wondered about Miss Boyd. The large young man,
for instance, whose name he had learned was Louis Akers, did not
come any more. Not since that telephone conversation. But he had been
distinctly a grade above that competent young person, Edith Boyd, if
there were such grades these days; fluent and prosperous-looking, and
probably able to offer a girl a good home. But she had thrown him over.
He had heard her doing it, and when he had once ventured to ask her
about Akers she had cut him off curtly.

"I was sick to death of him. That's all," she had said.

But on the night of Lily's invitation he was to hear more of Louis
Akers.

It was his evening in the shop. One day he came on at seven-thirty in
the morning and was off at six, and the next he came at ten and stayed
until eleven at night. The evening business was oddly increasing. Men
wandered in, bought a tube of shaving cream or a tooth-brush, and sat
or stood around for an hour or so; clerks whose families had gone to the
movies, bachelors who found their lodging houses dreary, a young doctor
or two, coming in after evening office hours to leave a prescription,
and remaining to talk and listen. Thus they satisfied their gregarious
instinct while within easy call of home.

The wealthy had their clubs. The workmen of the city had their balls and
sometimes their saloons. But in between was that vast, unorganized male
element which was neither, and had neither. To them the neighborhood
pharmacy, open in the evening, warm and bright, gave them a rendezvous.
They gathered there in thousands, the country over. During the war they
fought their daily battles there, with newspaper maps. After the war the
League of Nations, local politics, a bit of neighborhood scandal, washed
down with soft drinks from the soda fountain, furnished the evening's
entertainment.

The Eagle Pharmacy had always been the neighborhood club, but with the
advent of Willy Cameron it was attaining a new popularity. The roundsman
on the beat dropped in, the political boss of the ward, named Hendricks,
Doctor Smalley, the young physician who lived across the street, and
others. Back of the store proper was a room, with the prescription desk
at one side and reserve stock on shelves around the other three. Here
were a table and a half dozen old chairs, a war map, still showing with
colored pins the