it had not been.  He sat looking at Terry, and waggling his head in time to the music.  Not that Terry was a beauty.  But she was one of those immaculately clean types.  That look of fragrant cleanliness was her chief charm.  Her clear, smooth skin contributed to it, and the natural pencilling of her eyebrows.  But the thing that accented it, and gave it a last touch, was the way in which her black hair came down in a little point just in the centre of her forehead, where hair meets brow.  It grew to form what is known as a cow-lick. (A prettier name for it is widow’s peak.) Your eye lighted on it, pleased, and from it travelled its gratified way down her white temples, past her little ears, to the smooth black coil at the nape of her neck.  It was a trip that rested you.

At the end of the last performance on the second night of his visit to the Bijou, Orville waited until the audience had begun to file out.  Then he leaned forward over the rail that separated orchestra from audience.

“Could you,” he said, his tones dulcet, “could you oblige me with the name of that last piece you played?”

Terry was stacking her music.  “George!” she called, to the drum.  “Gentleman wants to know the name of that last piece.”  And prepared to leave.

“’My Georgia Crackerjack’,” said the laconic drum.

Orville Platt took a hasty side-step in the direction of the door toward which Terry was headed.  “It’s a pretty thing,” he said, fervently.  “An awful pretty thing.  Thanks.  It’s beautiful.”

Terry flung a last insult at him over her shoulder:  “Don’t thank me for it.  I didn’t write it.”

Orville Platt did not go across the street to the hotel.  He wandered up Cass street, and into the ten-o’clock quiet of Main street, and down as far as the park and back.  “Pretty as a pink!  And play!...  And good, too.  Good.”

A fat man in love.

At the end of six months they were married.  Terry was surprised into it.  Not that she was not fond of him.  She was; and grateful to him, as well.  For, pretty as she was, no man had ever before asked Terry to be his wife.  They had made love to her.  They had paid court to her.  They had sent her large boxes of stale drug-store chocolates, and called her endearing names as they made cautious declaration such as: 

“I’ve known a lot of girls, but you’ve got something different.  I don’t know.  You’ve got so much sense.  A fellow can chum around with you.  Little pal.”

Orville’s headquarters were Wetona.  They rented a comfortable, seven-room house in a comfortable, middle-class neighbourhood, and Terry dropped the red velvet turbans and went in for picture hats and paradise aigrettes.  Orville bought her a piano whose tone was so good that to her ear, accustomed to the metallic discords of the Bijou instrument, it sounded out of tune.  She played a great deal at first, but unconsciously she missed the sharp spat of applause that used to follow her public performance.  She would play a piece, brilliantly, and then her hands would drop to her lap.  And the silence of her own sitting room would fall flat on her ears.  It was better on the evenings when Orville was home.  He sang, in his throaty, fat man’s tenor, to Terry’s expert accompaniment.