to base anxiety.  How would “Poppa” take it if he, Dickie, should be seen sitting out a dance with Miss Arundel?  Dickie was profoundly afraid of his father.  It was a fear that he had never been allowed the leisure to outgrow.  Sylvester with torture of hand and foot and tongue had fostered it.  And Dickie’s childhood had lingered painfully upon him.  He could not outgrow all sorts of feelings that other fellows seemed to shed with their short trousers.  He was afraid of his father, physically and morally; his very nerves quivered under the look of the small brown eyes.

Nevertheless, as Sheila thanked Jim for her waltz, her elbow was touched by a cold finger.

“Here I am,” said Dickie.  He had a demure and startled look.  “Let’s sit it out in the room between the babies and the dancin’-room—­two kinds of a b-a-w-l, ain’t it?  But I guess we can hear ourselves speak in there.  There’s a sort of a bench, kind of a hard one...”

Sheila followed and found herself presently in a half-dark place under a row of dangling coats.  An iron stove near by glowed with red sides and a round red mouth.  It gave a flush to Dickie’s pale face.  Sheila thought she had never seen such a wistful and untidy lad.

Yet, poor Dickie at the moment appeared to himself rather a dashing and heroic figure.  He had certainly shown courage and had done his deed with jauntiness.  Besides, he had on his only good suit of dark-blue serge, very thin serge.  It was one that he had bought second-hand from Jim, and he was sure, therefore, of its perfection.  He thought, too, that he had mastered, by the stern use of a wet brush, a cowlick which usually disgraced the crown of his head.  He hadn’t.  It had long ago risen to its wispish height.

“Jim dances fine, don’t he?” Dickie said.  “I kind of wish I liked to dance.  Seems like athletic stunts don’t appeal to me some way.”

“Would you call dancing an athletic stunt?” Sheila leaned back against a coat that smelled strongly of hay and tobacco and caught up her knees in her two hands so that the small white slippers pointed daintily, clear of the floor.

Dickie looked at them.  It seemed to him suddenly that a giant’s hand had laid itself upon his heart and turned it backwards as a pilot turns his wheel to change the course of a ship.  The contrary movement made him catch his breath.  He wanted to put the two white silken feet against his breast, to button them inside his coat, to keep them in his care.

“Ain’t it, though?” he managed to say.  “Ain’t it an athletic stunt?”

“I’ve always heard it called an accomplishment.”

“God!” said Dickie gently.  “I’d ‘a’ never thought of that.  I do like ski-ing, though.  Have you tried it, Miss Arundel?”

“No.  If I call you Dickie, you might call me Sheila, I think.”

Dickie lifted his eyes from the feet.  “Sheila,” he said.

He was curiously eloquent.  Again Sheila felt the confusion that had sent her abruptly back to Jim.  She smoothed out the tulle on her knee.