“Well, Mayme; how is the ardent swain?”

She turned to me with the old flash in her big, shadowed eyes:  “Did you say swain or swine, Dominie?”

“Ah!” said I.  “Has he changed his role?”

“He’s given himself away, if that’s what you mean.”

“I thought that would come.”

“He—­he wanted me to take a trip to Boston with him.”

I considered this bit of information, which was not as surprising or unexpected as Mayme appeared to deem it.  “Have you told the Little Red Doctor?”

“Doc’d kill him,” said Mayme simply.

“What better reason for telling?”

“Oh, the poor kid:  he don’t know any better.”

“Doesn’t he?  In any case I trust that you know better, after this, than to have anything more to do with him.”

“Yep.  I’ve cut him out,” replied Mayme listlessly.  “I figured you and Doc were right, Dominie.  It’s no good, his kind of game.  Not for girls like me.”  She looked up at me with limpid eyes, in which there was courage and determination and suffering.

“My dear,” I murmured, “I hope it isn’t going to be too hard.”

“He’s so pretty,” said Mayme McCartney wistfully.

So he was, now that I came to think of it.  With his clear, dark color, his wavy hair, his languishing brown eyes, his almost girlishly graceful figure, and his beautiful clothes, he was pretty enough to fascinate any inexperienced imagination.  But I cannot say that he looked pretty when, a few days later, he invaded Our Square in search of a Mayme who had vanished beyond his ken (she had kept her tenement domicile a secret from him), and, addressing me as “you white-whiskered old goat,” accused me of having come between him and the girl upon whom he had deigned to bestow his lordly favor.  Unfortunately for him, the Little Red Doctor chanced along just then and inquired, none too deferentially, what the Scion of Wealth and Position was doing in that quarter.

“What business is it of yours, Red-Head?” countered the offended visitor.

He then listened with distaste, but perforce (for what else could he do in the grasp of a man of twice his power?), to a brilliant and convincing summary of his character, terminating in a withering sketch of his personal and sartorial appearance.

“I didn’t mean the kid any harm,” argued the Scion suavely.  “I—­I came back to apologize.”

“Let me catch you snooping around here again and I’ll break every bone in your body,” the Little Red Doctor answered him.

“I guess this Square’s free to everybody.  I guess you don’t own it,” said the youth, retreating to his car.

Notwithstanding the unimpeachable exactitude of this surmise, he was seen no more in that locality.  Judge, then, of our dismay, locally, at learning, not a fortnight later, from a fellow employee of Mayme’s, that she had been met at closing time by a swell young guy in a cherry-colored rattler, who took her away to dine with him.  Catechized upon the point, later on, by a self-appointed committee of two consisting of the Little Red Doctor and myself, Mayme said vaguely that it was all right; we didn’t understand.  This is, I believe, the usual formula.  The last half of it at least, was true.