“Didn’t I massacre him?” he said.  “That there was a half-Nelson holt I give him.  It put him out of business all right, all right.  Say, I never knowed you was there!”

“You bet I was,” said his companion in honest admiration; “that was when I got stuck on you!”

Before he could fully comprehend the significance of this confession, the curtain rose, and love itself had to make way for the tragic and absorbing career of “The Widowed Bride.”  By the end of the third act Joe’s emotions were so wrought upon by the unhappy fate of the heroine, that he rose abruptly and, muttering something about “gittin’ some gum,” fled to the rear.  When he returned and squeezed his way back to his seat he found “Miss Beaver” with red eyes and a dejected mien.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked banteringly.

“My shoe hurts me,” said Miss Beaver evasively.

“What you givin’ me?” asked Joe, with fine superiority.  “These here kinds of play never hurts my feelin’s none.  Catch me cryin’ at a show!”

But Miss Beaver was too much moved to recover herself at once.  She sat in limp dejection and surreptitiously dabbed her eyes with her moist ball of a handkerchief.

Joe was at a loss to know how to meet the situation until his hand, quite by chance, touched hers as it lay on the arm of her chair.  He withdrew it as quickly as if he had received an electric shock, but the next moment, like a lodestone following a magnet, it traveled slowly back to hers.

From that time on Joe sat staring straight ahead of him in embarrassed ecstasy, while Miss Beaver, thus comforted, was able to pass through the tragic finale of the last act with remarkable composure.

When the time came to say “Good night” at the Beavers’ door, all Joe’s reticence and awkwardness returned.  He watched her let herself in and waited until she lit a candle.  Then he found himself out on the pavement in the dark feeling as if the curtain had gone down on the best show be had ever seen.  Suddenly a side window was raised cautiously and he heard his name called softly.  He had turned the corner, but he went back to the fence.

“Say!” whispered the voice at the window, “I forgot to tell you—­It’s Mittie.”

The course of true love thus auspiciously started might have flowed on to blissful fulfilment had it not encountered the inevitable barrier in the formidable person of Mrs. Beaver.  Not that she disapproved of Mittie receiving attention; on the contrary, it was her oft-repeated boast that “Mittie had been keepin’ company with the boys ever since she was six, and she ’spected she’d keep right on till she was sixty.”  It was not attention in the abstract that she objected to, it was rather the threatening of “a steady,” and that steady, the big, awkward, shy Joe Ridder.  With serpentine wisdom she instituted a counter-attraction.