When the clock struck ten, Tansey hastily laid down his cue and struck sharply upon the show-case with a coin for the attendant to come and receive the pay for his score.

“What’s your hurry, Tansey?” called one.  “Got another engagement?”

“Tansey got an engagement!” echoed another.  “Not on your life.  Tansey’s got to get home at Motten by her Peek’s orders.”

“It’s no such thing,” chimed in a pale youth, taking a large cigar from his mouth; “Tansey’s afraid to be late because Miss Katie might come down stairs to unlock the door, and kiss him in the hall.”

This delicate piece of raillery sent a fiery tingle into Tansey’s blood, for the indictment was true—­barring the kiss.  That was a thing to dream of; to wildly hope for; but too remote and sacred a thing to think of lightly.

Casting a cold and contemptuous look at the speaker—­a punishment commensurate with his own diffident spirit—­Tansey left the room, descending the stairs into the street.

For two years he had silently adored Miss Peek, worshipping her from a spiritual distance through which her attractions took on stellar brightness and mystery.  Mrs. Peek kept a few choice boarders, among whom was Tansey.  The other young men romped with Katie, chased her with crickets in their fingers, and “jollied” her with an irreverent freedom that turned Tansey’s heart into cold lead in his bosom.  The signs of his adoration were few—­a tremulous “Good morning,” stealthy glances at her during meals, and occasionally (Oh, rapture!) a blushing, delirious game of cribbage with her in the parlour on some rare evening when a miraculous lack of engagement kept her at home.  Kiss him in the hall!  Aye, he feared it, but it was an ecstatic fear such as Elijah must have felt when the chariot lifted him into the unknown.

But to-night the gibes of his associates had stung him to a feeling of forward, lawless mutiny; a defiant, challenging, atavistic recklessness.  Spirit of corsair, adventurer, lover, poet, bohemian, possessed him.  The stars he saw above him seemed no more unattainable, no less high, than the favour of Miss Peek or the fearsome sweetness of her delectable lips.  His fate seemed to him strangely dramatic and pathetic, and to call for a solace consonant with its extremity.  A saloon was near by, and to this he flitted, calling for absinthe—­beyond doubt the drink most adequate to his mood—­the tipple of the roue, the abandoned, the vainly sighing lover.

Once he drank of it, and again, and then again until he felt a strange, exalted sense of non-participation in worldly affairs pervade him.  Tansey was no drinker; his consumption of three absinthe anisettes within almost as few minutes proclaimed his unproficiency in the art; Tansey was merely flooding with unproven liquor his sorrows; which record and tradition alleged to be drownable.

Coming out upon the sidewalk, he snapped his fingers defiantly in the direction of the Peek homestead, turned the other way, and voyaged, Columbus-like into the wilds of an enchanted street.  Nor is the figure exorbitant, for, beyond his store the foot of Tansey had scarcely been set for years—­store and boarding-house; between these ports he was chartered to run, and contrary currents had rarely deflected his prow.