“Why?”

“Oh, you wait!  If ever I tell her that you—­that anybody ever met her and then forgot!  Why, she knows the color of your hair and eyes, and she knows the pattern of that horsehair hat-band and the size of your boots—­she admires a man whose feet haven’t two or three inches for every foot of his height—­she says you wear fives, and you don’t lack much of being six feet tall, and—­”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” protested Billy, very red and uncomfortable.  “What have I done to yuh that you throw it into me like that?  My hands are up—­and they’ll stay up if you’ll only quit it.”

Miss Bridger looked at him sidelong and laughed to herself.  “That’s to pay you for forgetting that you ever met Mama Joy,” she asserted.  “I shouldn’t be surprised if next week you’ll have forgotten that you ever met me.  And if you do, after that chicken stew—­”

“You’re a josher,” said Billy helplessly, not being prepared to say just all he thought about the possibility of his forgetting her.  He wished that he understood women better, so that he might the better cope with the vagaries of this one; and so great was his ignorance that he never dreamed that every man since Adam had wished the same thing quite as futilely.

“I’m not going to josh now,” she promised, with a quick change of manner.  “You haven’t—­I know you haven’t, but I’ll give you a chance to dissemble—­you haven’t a partner for the dance, have you?”

“No.  Have you?” Billy did have the courage to say that, though he dared not say more.

“Well, I—­I could be persuaded,” she hinted shamelessly.

“Persuade nothing!  Yuh belong to me, and if anybody tries to throw his loop over your head, why—­” Billy looked dangerous; he meant the Pilgrim.

“Thank you.”  She seemed relieved, and it was plain she did not read into his words any meaning beyond the dance, though Billy was secretly hoping that she would.  “Do you know, I think you’re perfectly lovely.  You’re so—­so comfortable.  When I’ve known you a little longer I expect I’ll be calling you Charming Billy, or else Billy Boy.  If you’ll stick close to me all through this dance and come every time I lift my eyebrows this way”—­she came near getting kissed, right then, but she never knew it—­“and say it’s your dance and that I promised it to you before, I’ll be—­awfully grateful and obliged.”

“I wisht,” said Billy pensively, “I had the nerve to take all this for sudden admiration; but I savvy, all right.  Some poor devil’s going to get it handed to him to-night.”

For the first time Miss Bridger blushed consciously.  “I—­well, you’ll be good and obliging and do just what I want, won’t you?”

“Sure!” said Billy, not trusting himself to say more.  Indeed, he had to set his teeth hard on that word to keep more from tumbling out.  Miss Bridger seemed all at once anxious over something.