“Don’t you think he’s much more likely to hurt somebody else?  For a guess, that queer-looking little citizen in spectacles over the way, who so evidently doesn’t know where he is at.”

“Oh, do you think so?—­Bee!...  Then, after stationery, comes the disagreeable thing, and yet interesting too.  I have to go to my Aunt Jennie’s, dunning.”

“You are compelled to dun your Aunt Jennie?”

She laughed.  “No—­dun for her, because she’s too tender-hearted to do it herself.  There’s a man there who won’t pay his board.  Bee!  Bee!—­BEE!-O heavens—­It’s happened!”

And, too quick for West, she was gone into the melee, which immediately closed in behind her, barricading him away.

What had happened was a small tragedy in its way.  The little citizen in spectacles, who had been standing on the opposite corner vacantly eating an apple out of a paper bag, had unwisely chosen his moment to try the crossing.  He was evidently an indoors sort of man and no shakes at crossing streets, owing to the introspective nature of his mind.  A grocery wagon shaved him by an inch.  It was doing things to the speed-limit, this wagon, because a dashing police patrol was close behind, treading on its tail and indignantly clanging it to turn out, which it could not possibly do.  To avoid erasing the little citizen, the patrol man had to pull sharply out; and this manoeuvre, as Fate had written it, brought him full upon the great dog Behemoth, who, having slipped across the tracks, stood gravely waiting for the flying wagon to pass.  Thus it became a clear case of sauve qui peut, and the devil take the hindermost.  There was nothing in the world for Behemoth to do but wildly leap under the hoofs for his life.  This he did successfully.  But on the other side he met the spectacled citizen full and fair, and down they went together with a thud.

The little man came promptly to a sitting posture and took stock of the wreck.  His hat he could not see anywhere, the reason being that he was sitting on it.  The paper bag, of course, had burst; some of the apples had rolled to amazing distances, and newsboys, entire strangers to the fallen gentleman, were eating them with cries of pleasure.  This he saw in one pained glance.  But on the very heels of the dog, it seemed, came hurrying a girl with marks of great anxiety on her face.

“Can you possibly forgive him?  That fire-alarm thing scared him crazy—­he’s usually so good!  You aren’t hurt, are you?  I do hope so much that you aren’t?”

The young man, sitting calmly in the street, glanced up at Miss Weyland with no sign of interest.

“I have no complaint to make,” he answered, precisely; “though the loss of my fruit seems unfortunate, to say the least of it.”

“I know!  The way they fell on them,” she answered, as self-unconscious as he—­“quite as though you had offered to treat!  I’m very much mortified—­But—­are you hurt?  I thought for a minute that the coal cart was going right over you.”