At two o’clock the crowd began to thin.  Business would be slack, now, until five, when it would again pick up until closing time at six.

The fat vocalist put down his megaphone, wiped his forehead, and regarded Terry with a warm blue eye.  He had just finished singing “I’ve Wandered Far from Dear Old Mother’s Knee.” (Bernie Gottschalk Inc.  Chicago.  New York.  You can’t get bit with a Gottschalk hit. 15 cents each.)

“Girlie,” he said, emphatically, “You sure—­can—­play!” He came over to her at the piano and put a stubby hand on her shoulder.  “Yessir!  Those little fingers—­”

Terry just turned her head to look down her nose at the moist hand resting on her shoulder.  “Those little fingers are going to meet your face—­suddenly—­if you don’t move on.”

“Who gave you your job?” demanded the fat man.

“Nobody.  I picked it myself.  You can have it if you want it.”

“Can’t you take a joke?”

“Label yours.”

As the crowd dwindled she played less feverishly, but there was nothing slipshod about her performance.  The chubby songster found time to proffer brief explanations in asides.  “They want the patriotic stuff.  It used to be all that Hawaiian dope, and Wild Irish Rose junk, and songs about wanting to go back to every place from Dixie to Duluth.  But now seems it’s all these here flag raisers.  Honestly, I’m so sick of ’em I got a notion to enlist to get away from it.”

Terry eyed him with, withering briefness.  “A little training wouldn’t ruin your figure.”

She had never objected to Orville’s embonpoint.  But then, Orville was a different sort of fat man; pink-cheeked, springy, immaculate.

At four o’clock, as she was in the chorus of “Isn’t There Another Joan of Arc?” a melting masculine voice from the other side of the counter said, “Pardon me.  What’s that you’re playing?”

Terry told him.  She did not look up.

“I wouldn’t have known it.  Played like that—­a second Marseillaise.  If the words—­what are the words?  Let me see a—­”

“Show the gentleman a ’Joan’,” Terry commanded briefly, over her shoulder.  The fat man laughed a wheezy laugh.  Terry glanced around, still playing, and encountered the gaze of two melting masculine eyes that matched the melting masculine voice.  The songster waved a hand uniting Terry and the eyes in informal introduction.

“Mr. Leon Sammett, the gentleman who sings the Gottschalk songs wherever songs are heard.  And Mrs.—­that is—­and Mrs. Sammett—­”

Terry turned.  A sleek, swarthy world-old young man with the fashionable concave torso, and alarmingly convex bone-rimmed glasses.  Through them his darkly luminous gaze glowed upon Terry.  To escape their warmth she sent her own gaze past him to encounter the arctic stare of the large blonde person who had been included so lamely in the introduction.  And at that the frigidity of that stare softened, melted, dissolved.