ed at me curiously.

"You're a very hard man to convince, Mr. Carleton," she told me, with that
same queer look in her eyes. I was beginning to get drunk--intoxicated, if
you like the word better--on those same eyes; they always affected me,
somehow, as if I'd never seen them before; always that same little tingle
of surprise went over me when she lifted those heavy fringes of lashes.
I'm not psychologist enough to explain this, and I'm strictly no good at
introspection; it was that way with me, and that will have to do.

I told her she probably would never meet another who required so much
convincing, and, after wrangling over the matter politely for a minute,
got her to promise me another waltz, said promise to be redeemed after
supper.

I tried to talk to "Aunt Lodema," but she would have none of me, and she
seemed to think I had more than my share of effrontery to attempt such a
thing. Mrs. Loroman was better, and I filled in fifteen minutes or so very
pleasantly with her. After that I went over to Edith and got her to sit
out a dance with me.

The first thing she asked me was about Frosty. Who was he? and why was he
here? and how long had he been here? I told her all I knew about him, and
then turned frank and asked her why she wanted to know.

"Mama hasn't recognized him--yet," she said confidentially, "but I was
sure he was the same. He has shaved his mustache, and he's much browner
and heavier, but he's Fred Miller--and why doesn't he come and speak to
me?"

Out of much words, I gathered that she and Frosty were, to put it mildly,
old friends. She didn't just say there was an engagement between them, but
she hinted it; his father had "had trouble"--the vagueness of women!--and
Edith's mama had turned Frosty down, to put it bluntly. Frosty had,
ostensibly, gone to South Africa, and that was the last of him. Miss Edith
seemed quite disturbed over seeing him there in Kenmore. I told her that
if Frosty wanted to stay in the background, that was his privilege and my
gain, and she smiled at me vaguely and said of course it didn't really
matter.

At supper-time our crowd got the storekeeper intimidated sufficiently to
open his store and sell us something to eat. The King faction had looked
upon us blackly, though there were too many of us to make it safe
meddling, and none of us were minded to break bread with them. Instead, we
sat around on the counter and on boxes in the store, and ate crackers and
sardines a