l of astonishment. His fiddle-bow faltered--stopped. He turned to his
two fellows and gave hasty directions. The waltz measure died away, and
a quadrille was announced.

"That was too bad," said Stoddard as they came to a halt; "you were just
getting the step beautifully."

The girl flashed a swift, sweet look up at him. "I do love to dance,"
she breathed.

"John, would you be so kind as to come and help in the supper room,"
Miss Sessions's hasty tones broke in.

She was leaning on Charlie Conroy's arm, and when she departed to hide
Johnnie safely away in the depths of their impromptu kitchen, it left
the two men alone together. Conroy promptly fastened upon the other.

Charlie Conroy was a young man who had made up his mind to get on
socially. Such figures are rarer in America than in the old world. Yet
Charlie Conroy with his petty ambitions does not stand entirely alone.
He seriously regarded marriage as a stepping-stone to a circle which
should include "the best people." That this term did not indicate the
noblest or most selfless, need hardly be explained. It meant only that
bit of froth which in each community rides high on the top of the cup,
and which, in Watauga, was augmented by the mill owners of its suburb of
Cottonville. Conroy had been grateful for the opportunity to make an
entry into this circle by means of assisting Miss Sessions in her
charitable work. That lady herself, as sister-in-law of Jerome Hardwick
and a descendant of an excellent New England family, he regarded with
absolute veneration, quite too serious and profound for anything so
assured as mere admiration.

"I tried to warn you," he began: "but you were bound to get stung."

"I beg your pardon?" returned Stoddard in that civil, colourless
interrogation which should always check over-familiar speech, even from
the dullest. But Conroy was not sensitive.

"That big red-headed girl, you know," he said, leaning close and
speaking in a confidential tone. "I mistook her for a lady. I was going
my full length--telling her what fun the mill girls were, and trying to
do the agreeable--when I found out."

"Found out what?" inquired Stoddard. "That she was not a lady?"

"Aw, come off," laughed Conroy. "You make a joke of everything."

"I knew that she was a weaver in the mill," said Stoddard quietly.

Conroy glanced half wistfully over his shoulder in the direction where
Johnnie had vanished.

"She's a good-looker all right," he said th