[Illustration:  It began when his Heart’s Desire had fluttered into his autograph album.]

He followed the corrugated course of true love, step by step up to its climax, where, a week before, she had given him his choice of her new pack of assorted visiting-cards.  He rose at the end of five minutes’ sombre meditation, holding the curling gelatine card of his choice in his warm hand.  After venting a heavy sigh, he checked a motion to throw away the token of his undoing and put it back into his pocket.  While he was plotting dark things against the life and happiness of Mealy Jones, Piggy heard the sound of the merriment within, and a mischievous smile spread over his angry countenance.  He tiptoed to the window, and peeped in.  He saw his Heart’s Desire sitting alone.  He cheered up a little, not much—­but sufficiently to reach in his pocket for his tick-tack.

Now, it may be clearly proved, if necessary, that the tick-tack was invented by the devil.  Any wise man’s son knows that every boy between the ages of ten and fourteen carries with him at all times a complete outfit of the mechanical devices on which the devil holds the patent and demands a royalty.  So there is nothing really strange in the statement that Piggy Pennington took from his Sunday clothes, beneath a pocketful of Rewards of Merit for regular attendance at Sunday-school—­all dated before the Christmas-tree—­a spool with notched wheels, a lead pencil, and a bit of fishline.  The line wound round the spool.  Piggy put the pencil through the hole in the spool, and held the notched rims of the spool against the window pane by pressing on the pencil axle.  He gave the cord a quick jerk; a rattle, a wail, and a shriek were successively produced by the notches whirring on the glass.  The company within doors screamed.  Everyone knew it was Piggy, but no one ever lived with nerves strong enough to withstand the shock of a tick-tack.  At the first shock those in-doors decided to ignore the disturbance.  But it occurred twice afterwards, and a third tick-tack at a party is a dare.  So the boys took it up.  As Piggy ran he forgot his hot, heavy shoes; he felt the night wind on his face and in his hair.  He cared nothing for his pursuers; he ran for the gladness that came with running.  Now he slackened his pace and let the boys catch up with him, and again he spread the mocking distance between them.  He turned down an alley, and eluded the pack.

All the youngsters at the party, even the girls, had scampered out of the house to watch the race.  When Piggy vaulted the back-yard fence into Miss Morgan’s garden, he heard the pursuers half a block away.  He saw, a hundred feet distant, a bevy of girls standing on the sidewalk.  And he saw, too, as he came skipping down the lot, something that made him fairly skim over the earth; his Heart’s Desire, standing alone, near the porch, in his path, under an apple-tree.  The exhilaration of the chase had made him forget