rom Bert. Saxon sang in a clear, true soprano, thin but sweet, and she
was aware that she was singing to Billy.

"Now THAT is singing what is," he proclaimed, when she had finished.
"Sing it again. Aw, go on. You do it just right. It's great."

His hand slipped to hers and gathered it in, and as she sang again she
felt the tide of his strength flood warmingly through her.

"Look at 'em holdin' hands," Bert jeered. "Just a-holdin' hands
like they was afraid. Look at Mary an' me. Come on an' kick in, you
cold-feets. Get together. If you don't, it'll look suspicious. I got my
suspicions already. You're framin' somethin' up."

There was no mistaking his innuendo, and Saxon felt her cheeks flaming.

"Get onto yourself, Bert," Billy reproved.

"Shut up!" Mary added the weight of her indignation. "You're
awfully raw, Bert Wanhope, an' I won't have anything more to do with
you--there!"

She withdrew her arms and shoved him away, only to receive him
forgivingly half a dozen seconds afterward.

"Come on, the four of us," Bert went on irrepressibly. "The
night's young. Let's make a time of it--Pabst's Cafe first, and then
some. What you say, Bill? What you say, Saxon? Mary's game."

Saxon waited and wondered, half sick with apprehension of this man
beside her whom she had known so short a time.

"Nope," he said slowly. "I gotta get up to a hard day's work to-morrow,
and I guess the girls has got to, too."

Saxon forgave him his tone-deafness. Here was the kind of man she always
had known existed. It was for some such man that she had waited. She was
twenty-two, and her first marriage offer had come when she was sixteen.
The last had occurred only the month before, from the foreman of the
washing-room, and he had been good and kind, but not young. But this
one beside her--he was strong and kind and good, and YOUNG. She was too
young herself not to desire youth. There would have been rest from fancy
starch with the foreman, but there would have been no warmth. But this
man beside her.... She caught herself on the verge involuntarily of
pressing his hand that held hers.

"No, Bert, don't tease he's right," Mary was saying. "We've got to get
some sleep. It's fancy starch to-morrow, and all day on our feet."

It came to Saxon with a chill pang that she was surely older than Billy.
She stole glances at the smoothness of his face, and the essential
boyishness of him, so much desired, shocked her. Of course he would
marry