ed
that he grew tearful when he came into the hall and saw the splendour
that had been made for him. But his soul, despite his gratitude to the
boys and girls who gave the party, was filled with an unutterable
sadness; and he sat out many dances under the red lamp-shades with the
various girls who had been playing sister to him; and the boys to whom
the girls were more than sisters were not jealous.

As for the blonde, she beamed and preened and smiled on David, but her
name was not on his card, and as the silk-salesman was on the road, she
had many vacant lines on her programme, and she often sat alone by a
card-table shuffling the deck that lay there. The boy's eyes were dead
when they looked at her and her smile did not coax him to her. Once when
the others were dancing an extra David sat across the room from her, and
she went to him and sat by him, and said under the music:

"I thought we were always going to be friends--David?" And after he had
parried her for a while, he rose to go away, and she said: "Won't you
dance just once with me, Dave, just for old sake's sake before you go?"
And he put down his name for the next extra and thought of how long it
had been since the last June dance. Old sake's sake with youth may mean
something that happened only day before yesterday.

The boy did not speak to his partner during the next dance but went
about debating something in his mind; and when the number was ended he
tripped over to the leader of the orchestra, whom he had hired for
dances a score of times, and asked for "Love's Golden Dream Is Past" as
the next "extra." It was his waltz and he didn't care if the whole town
knew it--they would dance it together. And so when the orchestra began
he started away, a very heart-broken, brown-eyed, olive-skinned little
Welshman, who barely touched the finger-tips of a radiant, overdeveloped
blonde with roses in her cheeks and moonlight in her hair. She would
have come closer to him but he danced away and only hunted for her soul
with his brown Celtic eyes. And because David had asked for it and they
loved the boy, the old men in the orchestra played the waltz over and
over again, and at the end the dancers clapped their hands for an
encore, and when the chorus began they sang it dancing, and the boy
found the voice which cheered the "Men of Harlech," the sweet, cadent
voice of his race, and let out his heart in the words.

When he led her to a seat, the blonde had tears on